Giorgio Andreotta Calò

Giorgio Andreotta Calò has been making Clessidre [Hourglasses] series of sculptures with variations and evolutions since 1999. These works feature some of the core references and practices of his artistic research. From a formal point of view, each Clessidra is generated from a bronze reproduction of a fragment of briccola, a type of wooden pole typically used in the Venice lagoon to mark the boundaries of a canal or to moor boats, as well as element that characterises the urban genesis of the city. With its rhythmic changes in level as the tide ebbs and flows, the water corrodes these poles at the lagoon’s surface, thinning their central section until the upper part becomes detached from the base sunk into the lagoon bottom. The artist subsequently repurposes this residual form, created over time by the water’s ceaseless erosive action—from the cast of the fragment are generated two identical wax positives, subsequently cast in bronze, an incorruptible material. The two elements, assembled vertically on top of each other, generate the shape of an hourglass, an instrument used for measuring time. Natural forces and human gestures thus come together to determine the shape of the sculpture, initiating a process of material transformation that alternates and interleaves through time and space. The artist’s work is to recognise and intercept this change: through bronze casting, he arrests the natural course of events, subjecting the material to a final metamorphosis and then fixing it in suspended time. The specular reunion leads back to the original vision of the wooden pole reflected in the surface of the lagoon water. Through the concept of “reflection”, which refers both to the symmetry of the structure and to the act of “reflecting” understood as thinking, the coincidence and synthesis between the formal and conceptual dimensions of these sculptures is highlighted. Specularity is one of the elements that run transversally through the artist’s research, whose gaze has been shaped by the city and the Venice lagoon, emblem of integration between natural and anthropic. The work condenses the modes of this coexistence and translates them into sculptural language, crystallising them in a formal balance. The horizontal movement of the surface of the water and the rising tide determine the breaking of the briccola in its central part—at the intersection of the two orthogonal axes, at the point of greatest fragility of the wooden fragment, its symbolic reconfiguration is grafted. The hourglass thus becomes an instrument of landscape awareness, a material synthesis of the relationship between human forces and natural processes.