| The complex sculptural work of Italian artist Gianfranco Meggiato has a primordial life and a spirituality all its own. His bronze-latticed spheres and melting, magma-like cubes create an emotionally charged impact, reminiscent of the sun’s ever-burning but life-giving surface. These bronze orbs call to mind the power and immensity of the universe that surrounds us. On the other hand his thickly layered, hive-like cubes call to mind a permeable and intricately woven underworld. The artist’s oeuvre proposes that there are many merits in turning our eyes upward to the violent, unattainable beauty of the sun and stars above, and the darkness below. |
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Whitney May on Gianfranco Meggiato
The complex sculptural work of Italian artist Gianfranco Meggiato has a primordial life and a spirituality all its own. His bronze-latticed spheres and melting, magma-like cubes create an emotionally charged impact, reminiscent of the sun’s ever-burning but life-giving surface. These bronze orbs call to mind the power and immensity of the universe that surrounds us. On the other hand his thickly layered, hive-like cubes call to mind a permeable and intricately woven underworld. The artist’s oeuvre proposes that there are many merits in turning our eyes upward to the violent, unattainable beauty of the sun and stars above, and the darkness below.
In his work Disco with Disc, perhaps more so than in any other of Meggiato’s sculptures, it is the empty space in between the bronze sphere that makes up the primary medium and content of the work. Although Meggiato only constructs the bronze-within-bronze surfaces here, and not, of course, the negative space within, the pores and in-betweens of this layered “disco” sphere are the crux of the work. Paired with interior, winding arms of metal that tie the work’s insides to its exterior, the emptiness that resides between and beyond these surfaces draws the viewer into an internal world.
The artist explains this technique through his conviction that, “Man today focuses increasingly on external affirmations of himself and is less and less concerned with deep, inner awareness, and unwilling to undertake a journey into his most intimate nature in search of the meeting point between energy and essence.” In Disco with Disc, the artist succeeds in creating such an interior meeting point through the reflections of one sphere’s appearance upon another. A solid brass sphere reflects the golden sheen of a more porous, hollow, external one. In other words here stands an object whose solid core sees, reflects upon, and fully knows the truth about its exterior. Meggiato sets the example that he hopes modern man might follow—to look within in an attempt to truly discover the way in which the rest of this world perceives him, rather than without.
In Meggiato’s 2005 sculpture Hive Panel, the intricately woven, highly layered, and rectangular web of bronze, resembles a cross-section of a common beehive, but it can also stand in for the composition of the bubbling, ever-shifting core of the earth. Beehives may consist of whole civilizations buzzing with life, work, and perpetual, calculated change, but so too is the inconstant look and mood of the earth’s layered, liquid interior. Meggiato’s piece here gives the impression of solidity through sheer thickness alone, but that certain pores within its hard, bronze surface persist all the way through to the other side gives its instability away. If this perfectly rectangular structure immediately calls to mind a subterranean world full of shifting layers, one can’t help but wonder if the intention wasn’t to provide an earthly contrast to his heavenly inspired, highly polished bronze orbs. Regardless of whether Meggiato’s Hive Panel is actually meant to represent a darker underworld full of intricate volatility, however, this stands as one of the artist’s most compelling earth-bound works. The bronze here may not glisten like the sun and stars, but the dark web of drips and twists reminds one of the unparalleled complexity that comprises the very soil upon which we stand.
Just as in Disco With Disc, Meggiato again took as his medium the empty spaces and reflections in-between in the work Double Sphere with Sphere. This sculpture is perhaps the finest example of an expert treatment of light and shade upon the surfaces of his bronze works. In this piece not only does golden light shimmer off of every one of its polished surfaces while stationary, both within and without, but the discs also spin on a shared vertical axis. In this way, the artist ensures not only that the outside world is reflected within the core of this structure in three dimensions, but also that the bronze shines with all the light of its environment. The work shifts, changes, and undulates with each moment. If it is the presentation of light, life, and complexity that stands as the goal of Meggiato’s work, it is here that he achieves just this.
