Gianmaria Potenza

Italia • Italy

For the variation of the bodies and geometry he uses, Potenza has understood the importance and meaning of the sphere and especially of the oval in sculpting: that which for us is perceived as a source, an origin, a conclusive container - the ideal, primigenial form which induces the concept of birth. In his linguistic research, in the syntax of his geometric and physical language, Potenza has made these smooth, clean bodies mobile, now travelling through the illuminated space of dancing reflections and shades and, above all, celebrating their mobility. By modifying the static aspect of sculpture, the artist has accomplished a variation of the weight of the bronze body, and has allowed it to constitute a true and cultivated dynamism.

The typically organic parts of his works swarm over the surface of these modules in such an intense way that they could almost make up the entire subject, but now, a far cry from the scored and wounded spheres of Pomodoro (which a distracted eye could easily believe to recognize), Potenza’s sculptures interrogate light and space. The regular meandering (to which various other critics have attributed historical and complex formal derivations, ranging from the muses of the Orient to Viennese artistic decor) flow and reflect light, creating the interactivity and depth of its bronze “skin”, which reveals tactility and becomes plastic narration. It is visual penetration, like the breath of life in the body and in the motion of his sculpture, which reveals the complexity Potenza’s “plastic happening”. Potenza builds an object and, at the same time, denies its basic essence, almost having his sign be ineluctably repeated in a spiral of air, in an atmosphere which transforms weight into lightness. In this way, in his transformation of bronze, giving it even the intense shine of gold, he allows his alchemist’s hortus conclusus to undertake its nth voyage. Sculptures made of bronze: from Venetian waters to new lands they will find the shining sun.

Luca Massimo Barbero