Naples
“Le memorie scavalcano il presente e attivano il future (Memories override the present and activate the future)…,” Gilberto Zorio’s recent survey, informally marked the 55-year anniversary of the seminal group exhibition “Arte Povera + Azioni Povere” (Amalfi, 1968), and his first collaboration with Lia and Marcello Rumma. Zorio has stated that his work “undergoes modifications but does not change,” so the survey format, which confirms his position as one of the most radical figures in progressive art from the 1960s to the present, augments rather than diminishes the experience of his ideas about sculpture and the artistic encounter.
Zorio’s production represents a continuum, with its roots in his first anti-form and post-Minimal, process-oriented sculptures from the mid-1960s. This show featured 11 works from six decades. The most recent, including Stella per purificare le parole (terracotta rossa), a structure in the shape of a five-pointed star, were realized in 2023. Built up with concrete blocks to knee height, the star’s horizontal outline is topped with Castellamonte terracotta, which originates in the hills north of Turin, the artist’s home region, and is often used for domestic wood-burning ovens. Viewers are invited to speak into a stem-like clay and aluminum mouthpiece that rises from a point on the perimeter. Their words pass through a reservoir of alcohol and emerge “cleansed” by the process to be released into the star-shaped enclosure, where, Zorio says, “terracotta accumulates feelings, oozes memories…I think of Giotto.”
For Zorio, performance and interaction are catalytic ingredients. Until someone steps forward to become part of the artwork, it lies latent but fallow. The viewer’s action activates materials selected for their physical properties rather than aesthetic qualities. These materials do a job in order for the artwork to “live.” A similar condition applies to Ciotola Fluorescente (1968), the earliest object on show. A broad, shallow, fiber cement bowl placed low on the floor contains a pool of water infused with aluminum silicate. This kaolin compound mixed with iron and impurities “provides warmth and gorgeous stellar images,” according to the artist, an effect set in motion by a visitor stirring the medley with a nylon rope on the rim of the bowl.
Any project by Zorio invariably takes hold of the architectural space like a habitat. Sculptures challenge architectural boundaries, cutting through, across, and around obstacles in space, as well as time. Here, linkages in iconography and immaterial effects proliferated, most noticeably in the form of the star that appeared in four more configurations, each occupying a discrete part in the gallery. The largest iteration was also horizontal: Stella per purificare le parole (terracotta nera) related to the piece in the adjacent room, setting up one of numerous conversations in form and possibility traversing the show. This star is colored black as if to contradict the white star next door, establishing a contrast of light and dark, night and day, that echoes the planet’s living cyclical rhythms. Its low-lying presence abutted a wall, as if trying to push through, so that the apex was forced upward and bent into a vertical position.
Elsewhere, the star was drawn on paper, using volcanic sand from the Aeolian island of Stromboli mixed with fluorescent red pigment and phosphorous, and outlined on various materials. In Stella di giavellotti (2009), five copper-plated steel javelins leaning into the viewer’s space defined the pentangle, while the silhouette of Stella di pergamena (2020) was cut from a jagged-edged sheet of parchment (prepared animal skin), supported on two javelins projecting powerfully into the room.
Apparent in these works was a further contrast—the opposition between invisible and invisible. The traces of phosphorus painted on the skin of Stella di pergamena and other works could only be seen when arc lights were illuminated in an orchestrated sequence of actions. First, a claxon sounded through the four rooms, into the lobby, and onto the stairs leading to the courtyard below. Then the gallery spots went out, the lamps flared into the momentary darkness, and the sweeps of particulate phosphorus appeared like a vision of the universe. The impact was intentionally spectacular, in the theatrical sense, as if to shock the viewer into new awareness. Light is the traditional agent of intelligibility, and Zorio employs it with a Baroque intensity reminiscent of Bernini. The effect transformed the experience of the exhibition, differentiating degrees of reality by seeming to open known space to infinite dimensions, not unlike light originating thousands of years ago, emitted by a source that might no longer exist, but visible now in the night sky.
By intertwining concepts of energy exchange in space and time, Zorio seeks to make intelligible an encounter between artistic practice and the fluid, dynamic forces that are the essence of being. His work traces multiple references to the body, particularly in his use of leather, as seen again in Pelle con resistenza (1969), an oblong of skin connected to cables that glow in a display of electric vitality. Action, real or implied, makes another connection to the body. The slender, upright Remo e Giavellotto (2023) combines an oar from New Guinea and a copper-covered javelin. Both instruments are empowered by human action to travel distances at speed, thus implying movement from present to the future.
Perhaps the most striking demonstration of this connection between art and human life appeared in the glass alembics that featured in two pieces in the largest gallery. Both hung from the ceiling, a reminder of Zorio’s disregard for conventional locations for sculpture and his desire to separate the viewer from dependence on the ground. In Cono di terracotta (1988), a gourd-shaped vessel containing alcohol is attached to iron pipes that feed air through the liquid via a hissing compressor. The use of technology, here and in the prominent arc lamps, is never hidden but integrated into a laboratory-like atmosphere. The word “alchemy” often accompanies descriptions of Zorio’s use of crucibles and mutable elements. It is, however, open to misinterpretation, for these works belong in the real world as opposed to a poetic or arcane sphere.
Zorio regards the body as a cauldron of distilled energies and mechanical processes, which connect to the natural forces that his work acknowledges as vehicles for change. Change is fluid and formless, expressed by Zorio’s signature phrase fluidità radicale. Quoted in Germano Celant’s Arte Povera (1969), which positioned the emergent Italian grouping within the international phenomena of conceptualism and Land Art, Zorio stated that “I like to talk of fluid and elastic things, things without lateral and formal perimeters.” His work challenges the static monumentality of conventional sculpture by being contingent on shifting environments, like ambient temperature or the viewer’s presence, with which it can react.
Just as works are subject to alteration through exposure, viewers must expect to be disoriented and to encounter vulnerability shared with the sculpture. By the same token, the artist surrenders his authority to the reactions of materials and people. The visual articulation of dynamic forces is conveyed by symbols that embody this fluidity, above all the star. Associated with numerous iconographic meanings, it is simultaneously an award for excellence and a Christian token, a celestial entity and an emblem equally of U.S. capitalism, Soviet communism, and the armed struggle of organizations such as Italy’s leftist Brigate Rosse. Discussions of Arte Povera often downplay the commitment of its participants to political liberation, which was, and continues to be, an integral part of artistic liberation. Born in the tumult of Italian society in the 1960s, the agitational language of Zorio’s activism remains current, and urgent.
A large-scale exhibition of Zorio’s work, organized by the Fondazione Malvinamemegaz, is on view at the Palazzo De Sanctis and the Palazzo Clemente in Castelbasso, Italy, through August 31, 2025.
