Art International May 1967 [antikvár]

COLLÁ: SCULPTURE OF THE IRON AGE MAURIZIO FAGIOLO DELL'ARCO Ettore Colla's recent show in Romé presented a series of works from 1966, mostly small in size. The material is iron, the composition is based on rhythm, while the true discovery is simplicity. It is the simplicity of one who has seen everything, too much in fact; of one who, in the labyrinth of thought, succeeds in finding again every day, one, ten, a thousand of Ariadne's threads; the simplicity of one who has been complex, the silence of one who has been a great speaker. All of Colla's best-known sculptures are based on simplicity, but they imply a long development that in the '50s carried him to a fresh and surprising New-Dada. In those sculptures the creative moment has three aspects; research, construction, and the attribution of mythical significance. In the first instance, Collá searches for parts for his sculpture: always old iron with a sad inheritance of rust. Collá knows that he is living in a society of refuse, the "Junk Culture" (to which Alloway, author of a definitive monograph on Collá, has referred). Nonetheless Collá does not take up discarded objects as death symbols; he collects them because he feels them still alive. The piece of iron is only, as Pascal would have said, "a gentleman in decay". Collá ventures among the scrap heaps with a divining rod; he knows beforehand the use that a certain wheel, bucket, coil, rod will have in his next sculptures and foresees the piacing of that particular pedestal, gear, ring, perforated sheet-in fact of all junk stored away by society. Every sculpture becomes a part of his life, a fragment of a "recherche du temps perdu" and the moment of " finding" replaces the mythical, or nonexistent moment of inspiration. If Picasso declares, "í don't search, I find", Collá could reply, "I find and collect only what I look for". In the second instance Collá assorts his "found" pieces, unites them and confronts them, then accepts them as is or modifies them foreseeing a specific result; this imaginative method corresponds to "the association of ideas" of the great Empiricist philosophers. It is, in a special sense, a form of constructivism, but with the intervention of a youthful fantasy.