Page 27 - Studio International - July 1965

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akin to what Pollock and Kline had achieved in painting.
The difficulty was to discover the act appropriate to
sculpture. The direct gesturing with material. possible in
painting as a means to transcend the object. only served
to enhance the 'object-like' quality of sculpture. In fact.
the direct gesturing of the action painters was not in
itself important. It merely served to arrive at the tension
that resulted from the revelation contained in the act.
Gio' Pomodoro had to invent a round-about way of
working. Already, in some of his earlier works he had
made negatives in clay. Now he made negatives of
strained and stretched cloths that would yield the final
one-sided surfaces. composed of tensions which inter­
knit into a complex network of opposing forces that pull
and push. transform and project them. engendering a
vertiginous series of spatial relations that dance across
and out from the surfaces. writhing performances of
light and dark. reflexions and refractions. cavities and
promontories. real and suggested. sculptures no longer
either object or sign. The tensions which distort these
surfaces achieve a fully-charged coherence as they
correspond to the tensions of physical being, the
bodily and mental tensions within the individual and
the social tensions between individuals.
Though these works neither intend to represent nor
consciously resemble any particular thing we may have
previously encountered. yet each individual work com­
municates to us a quite specific message as it matches
psychic states. That is to say. we respond to different

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