Produced in 1967, - Torcia
belongs to the early work of Gilberto Zorio whose first solo exhibition took place that same year at the leading vanguard Sperone Gallery in Turin. Two years later, the artist was part of the ground-breaking exhibition curated by Harald Szeemann at the Bern Kunsthalle,- When Attitudes Become Art: Live in your Head
. The late 1960s artistic landscape was boiling with free-spirited radical actions, innovative expressions and utterly new approaches to spatiality, media and materials. The making process became the artworks themselves as the performative actions and objects ostensibly concentrated and exhibited the physical, psychic, emotional, social and energetic forces at stake.

With his great creative freedom, Gilberto Zorio is a standout figure of sculpture renewal. Emancipated from the conventions of unity, fixity and stability, richness and beauty of the materials, Zorio employed a wide variety of unremarkable matters and objects such as cement, liquid rubber, metallic tubes, goatskins, crucibles or javelins to produce unusual precarious, moving or suspended sculptures that would forcefully occupy entire spaces.

- Torcia
is composed of a junction of industrially manufactured terminal tubes, of aluminium seamless pipes painted with red fluorescent acrylic and of a central black axis. This straight centre line rests with an inclination of 45 degrees from the ground and the whole structure, its weight and balance, is supported on three points.Emphasizing the constructible, linear and graphic dimensions of such materials utilised in several end-use technological markets, including Energy, Aerospace and Automotive, the piece conveys the ideas of assemblage and ramifications, lightness, ascent and rotary potentiality. Breaking with full volumes and the use of pedestal, the surprising object keeps the visible traces of the dynamic forces employed and the mechanical pressure exerted upon the pipes, giving them various angles and directions. The vivid red ramified lines may embody a stabilised process of fulgurous energetic radiation.

KS

The Walk

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