The art of sculpting colour
The stages through which Pino Di Gennaro, as a sculptor, develops and completes his work resemble those of a morphogenetic process. As such, we can understand them as being more natural than artificial, as the artist’s hand does not subject his materials to acts of violence such as carving, but rather awakens through his creative gesture the plant embryo it had found during the material’s ‘fermentation’; it is through this first impulse that the seed will slowly begin to sprout and develop its plastic form. Above all others, it is the phytomorphic and somewhat aquatic columns that have always fascinated me; primarily inspired and shaped by water, the most vital of the natural elements, in its interaction with light, we can say that the sculptor’s gaze has rested upon their surface longer than his hand has. In coherence with this approach, Di Gennaro’s sculpture is also moved by an ethical principle that guides and adds a universal value to his search for aesthetic quality; in fact, he chooses to mainly work with papier-mâché, a poor material recovered from waste he sometimes contrasts with the more lavish material of bronze, thus highlighting the qualities of each. All his works are founded on the interplay between matter, form, light, colour, and time; the artist’s hand, as we said above, merely acts as a medium to specific plastic processes which dictate, almost peremptorily, when to intervene, in what way, and upon what aspect; the artist’s sole purpose is to acquiesce, propitiate and support an in fieri process of morphogenesis and transformation that contains both bios and telos.
It is form that exerts its ilomorphic and phytomorphic will, one which the artist’s hand can only support as it acts as midwife: Pino Di Gennaro’s sculptures are effectively forme formans, shapes in progress whose final form transcends the artist’s will and design; the timing and outcomes of the final stages of their growth cycle answer only to the dictates of metamorphic ‘becoming’; that is, they self-determine in the same way as any other natural autopoietic process. As such, it is a way of making sculpture that claims its own life-right and begs the artist’s hand and mind to only spark and begin its genesis, and not to prefigure the work’s own form, which, like the embryo, flourishes within itself, and takes on the external appearance it requires. To better bless his work before it undertakes its own journey, the artist desists from arrogantly imposing his will on matter. However, we would be wrong in thinking that his creative forces are diminished as a consequence of this restraint. On the contrary, they acquire the even greater privilege of aiding Nature’s own creative will, and ensure his works are sculpted by the same forces that sustain and shape all living forms.
The morphogenesis of these sculptures seems to respond to the generative will of a living polytope, and I have always thought of the process of their creation as entertaining an isomorphic relationship with coral and its structure. This mineral, generated by an animal yet resembling a plant, undergoes metamorphic processes involving elements from the three main natural kingdoms. Its unique colourations are due to the fluorescent pigments it produces, which radiate a great variety of colours when exposed to ultraviolet light. Materiality, form, and colour become fluid elements that imply, in Pino’s works, a condition of constant transformation; they become marks of time, predisposed in such a way as to release completely unpredictable morphological and chromatic possibilities. These sculptures’ colour is not an outer layer being applied so as to cover and hide the true nature of their material, but rather the evershifting result of a continuous process of colouration and discolouration: it is a colour that is exuded from matter.
Colour does not play here a cosmetic function, nor does it correspond to what the Latin etymology would otherwise indicate; that is, its purpose is not to conceal or veil, but quite the opposite. It reveals and unveils the hidden soul of matter, which can see the light of day and acquire its intrinsic colours (in the theatre of life, as in that of art, being always coincides with appearing). One of papier-mâché’s most distinctive features is precisely the fact that its colour appears in such a way as to express a property that could easily be described as tactile. The paper pulp’s inherent colour emerges through the process of moulding, resulting in a plastic as well as an optical value. The colours of Pino’s works, besides being visible, have unmistakable tactile and haptic properties, and come with an elusive synaesthetic perception that crosses both the visible and the tangible. These colours are inseparable from the material structure in which they appear because they permeate even its most microscopic of fibres and therefore contribute to its density, consistency, hardness, strength, weight, fluidity, compactness, opacity, and transparency; in short, they have a key role in the way the plastic form both materialises and appears.
Colour is the interface between the phenomenal and the symbolic world through which the eye sees much more than what a wavelength’s value can express. In addition to the chromatic sensation, we are capable of perceiving tactile and polysemantic properties, as well as the ideas, passions, thoughts and emotions that colour ignites in the sculptor’s sensitivity and the receptive powers that have enhanced the expressive intentions of artists of all ages. We do not know to what extent it is a cultural or aesthetic reminiscence consciously evoked by the sculptor, but we do see in it an explicit reference to the fact that sculptures, from their archaic origins onwards, have always been coloured. Pino di Gennaro shapes colour in the same way he shapes earth, paper, and bronze, in a practice that would have been considered ordinary in the Classical Period. Polychrome sculptures, known as graphta andreia, painted statues, were to be placed outdoors on the blue background of the Greek sky, or in front of equally colourful walls, in contexts where the chromatic effect of the statue had to interact and harmonise with the colours of nature and/or those of a certain religious and historical background.
With all due respect, these factors were lost to Winchelmann’s achromatic eyes, appalled by ‘the barbaric custom of painting marble and stone’. In antiquity, sculptors conceived their works as being coloured forms from the start, not in the sense of a merely ‘coloured’ sculpture, but pondered, conceived and created so that the colouration was an integral part of its formal structure. This is because they were fully aware that colour, in addition to infusing life into the work of art, is the main factor in the eye’s thaumàzein: one of the reasons for art is to bring amazement and wonder to a beholder used to focusing on things and objects that are increasingly insignificant.