COLONNA FINITA

White project, Pescara, Italy, 2008

“Continuing almost to explore the voids left by sculpture, and the significant absences that this can inhabit, in 2008 Michelangelo Consani produced Colonna finita(Finite Column), where the Brancusian axiom, which the title mimics, is rendered in a series of marble-powder casts of plastic cups piled up one on top of the other. Marble, the quintessential sculptural stone, is reduced to the pure calcium carbonate of which it is composed and from which it profits today, destroying with explosives the quarries and with them the delicate relationship linking the material to the history of its extraction: an equilibrium between use and resource which has described the orography of a landscape and the art history of a whole sculptural tradition. The finiteness of the column alludes to the exhausting of modernity and its premises, for which Brancusi’s famous work provided inspiration, fuelling all the hopes the minimalists had in the relationship between mass industrial production and art. The chain of objects that remain standing in Consani’s work make reference to a series of disposable cups, the emblem of a consumerist model of using resources and of the material which, better than any other, represents this model: plastic. Rayon, Bakelite, celluloid, resin, nylon, Teflon, Plexiglas – evoking the names of plastic materials takes us through a long history of modern industry, encompassing design objects and mass manufacturing. And it takes us back tothat lowest common denominator: the processing of oil, the origin of them all.”

Matteo Lucchetti