Giordano Pozzi: Constructing Emotions
By Robert C. Morgan
As the Uruguayan painter, Joaquin Torres-Garcia, put forth in his essay, "The Abstract Rule" (1946), the most radical departures in art are often seen as the least conspicuous. Put another way, they are the least obvious. The art that is most controversial in its day is often that which is most subtle in its shift away from previously accepted forms of representation. This suggests that "shocking art" may have a lesser shelf life than art that confronts issues from the past by pushing those issues into a new dimension, and thus, representing a realiThe process of recalling forms of representation through an abstract modernist vocabulary is precisely what the new sculpture of Giordano Pozzi is trying to address. I daringly use the word "new" in Pozzi’s case for two reasons. Although the abstract modernist vocabulary of geometric form employed by Pozzi is not in itself a new one, his use of an original syntax by which to conjugate these forms is new. This suggests that originality in art – the demon of early postmodernism – is less about the appearance of a new form in art than the way old forms are conjugated. Thus, originality in art is a matter of the syntax. The second factor worth considering is that the kind of spatial geometry employed by Pozzi has a history. What he is doing did not come out of the void. Contrary to what some American gallerists believe, no real art ever comes out of the void. No matter how "new" the art may appear, there is always a history – a sequence of creative synaptical charges – behind it.
Having grown up in New York, Giordano Pozzi had ample opportunities to explore various kinds of art and to witness the emergence of monthly trends that appeared on the gallery circuit. Upon completion of his art school studies in the early nineties, he decided to move his studio to an abandoned warehouse area near Berkeley, California. It was here that Pozzi began to evolve an aesthetic that would gradually become his own. His early works from the nineties included welded steel armatures covered in varnished paper that were either suspended in open rectangular units or presented as free-standing forms. In addition to presenting exhibitions of some of these works in his warehouse space on the north side of Oakland Bay, Pozzi continued to vigorously explore structural concepts by welding quarter-inch steel rods into various geometric configurations. By 2001, he was working only with the steel rods, independent of other mixed media components. The resulting forms would be either simple, as in the unpainted Small Abstract, or complex, as in his recent Wail or Weeping Woman (2003). In Small Abstract, the form is tightly compressed as a solid linear unit. It reads as a formal construction depicting energy in space. The more recent, larger-scale construction, entitled Wail, is different.
Based on a photograph of an Arabic woman in a moment of grief as she discovers the death of her infant child, Wail reveals the artist’s extraordinary ability to capture the inexorable experience of grief and thereby to encapsulate the moment. Pozzi has imagined the situation – which is, after all, an inexorably human situation – and has moved it into the realm of abstraction. In Wail, the emotion is expressed through a delicately restrained, yet perceptibly unwieldy construction. To apply the word "abstraction" to this construction is not merely a journalistic chronicle of reality. Pozzi has chosen to transcribe – indeed, to transform — the mundane aspect of media representation into art. His formal acuity suggests an ability to deal with the containment of such events through a language that can be reinterpreted as art; therefore, we begin to understand that the sculpture is more than a frontal, two-dimensional representation in realist terms, but a three-dimensional abstraction of the real, a plastic reconsideration of a distanced moment in which another kind of reality begins to take hold. It is, the reality of spatial articulation where a human absence is felt, even for an instant of time.
Relative to this development in his work, Pozzi began to reflect on what he was trying to achieve: "I found myself wondering if I couldn’t represent the chaos of the ‘moment’ in a simplified manner that might embody the energy and multifaceted complexity of the ‘moment’ in an outlined state, essentially a form of baroque minimalism." This would suggest that Pozzi was chasing the notion of content in relation to a Minimal structure, that he was in search of something more than "pure form," and that he wanted to encapsulate a moment of perception and thought, almost as a rarified time-capsule, a network of signs in which seeing is believing. In Tall Man / Short Man (2003) — one of the artist’s most successful freestanding works – Pozzi represents two irregular cubist stacks. One is elongated and ascends vertically upward in three continuous linear segments, while the other is more like a double-stacked cube. There are two horizontally placed segments, both linear and cubic, serving as spatial interventions between the two upright forms. Pozzi explains that the sculpture was less about a direct observation that a refined intentional object in which he compares a peculiar, somewhat awkward relationship between two shapes. Seen autonomously from one another, the forms may not be seen as peculiar; but when presented in a comparative relationship, linked to one another, they do. Again, this suggests the problem of syntax in originality. The newness of Tall Man / Short Man is really about the conjugation of the shapes that normally might not be considered as part of the same sculptural space.
As Torres-Garcia predicted, abstraction is no less a continuing problematic today than it was nearly sixty years ago at the conclusion of the Second World War. Conservative taste tends to go for figurative representations that are more explicit in their representation than the kind of sophistication found in Pozzi. One might even regard the sculpture Cradle (2003) as being about the containment of human absence, expressing a far different form of emotional meaning. Here the upper element constructed mostly of linear squares units suspended in relation to a lower base element constructed in triangles serves as a testament of Pozzi’s formal sensitivity. Beyond this, there is the subtle maneuvering of content that Pozzi seems to identify as Baroque. Given his dual relationship to America and Italy, would it not make sense that Giordano Pozzi has found in these works the nexus of the pragmatic aspect of Minimalism conjoined with the paradoxical mysteries of the Baroque? To reflect on how these structures are made offers the means to feel their content. These are open in both their form and content to express the breadth of human issues that, at least from an historical perspective, the medium of sculpture has always managed to retain.
