Arcangelo Sassolino
The work of Arcangelo Sassolino originates from bis investigation into the truth in material
structure. It is a pursuit that begins with the desire to understand the sbifting values, realities and ambiguities surrounding material structures as unravelled by today's scientific discoveries. A complex concept evolves from within this discourse that, above everything else, intrinsically incorporates the importance of the single, immediate, and therefore momentary gesture. As said by Sassolino himself, it is the pouring of 'matter on a neutral support, registering the result of this action' which makes the definitive work, reflecting bis interest in 'stopping a thought, a moment, crystallizing a gesture'."
It is the artist's deliberate arbitrary suspension of the primordial thought, the concept, the
movement and the development which endows his works with that quality of ambiguity that strikes the viewer. Although the preconceived arbitrariness insists that Sassolino allows the material its own autonomy, to let it move at its own pace, to find its own form according to its exacting want to hold its own heavy weight and to disperse into lightness, it is also Sassolino who creates the foundations, decides upon the mass used and the moment to interact with, to let go or to stop the process. The artist's desire for the autonomy ofmass and material is only one indivisible aspect of his pre-meditated yet ongoing thoughts and the materialisation of bis works stem from an intimate and sometimes forceful dialogue between the continuously moving mass and the observing and, at times, intervening artist. The process of thought and action ceases slowly (or even quick1ydependant on hot or cold days in the studio) with the concrete becoming solid in terms of both the physical state of the material itself and the work encapsulating the primordial thought, the gesture and the course of development. That 'stopping a thought, a moment, crystallising a gesture' is, of course, only the final act of Sassolino's metamorphosis. At the beginning there is the play of oppositions.