Pinuccio Sciola: Sculptor in the Time of Stone

PINUCCIO SCIOLA Sculptor in the Time of Stone Gautam Dasgupta Line and color are abstractelements imposed on matter, but distinct from it ... they are the traces of the divine in the world. -Camille Mauclair ifteen kilometers outside of Cagliari, the capital city of Sardinia, lies San Sperate, a tiny unprepossessing village off the main north-south highway that bissects this forbidding Mediterranean island of rocky terrain and low-lying shrub. Over the years, under the inspired guidance of its illustrious son, the sculptor Pinuccio Sciola, the village has taken on a distinctive and artistic flavor redolent of myth and legend. From whatever direction one chooses to come upon San Sperate, on nearing it the visitor is compelled to witness a mute and imposing drama in stone. Lining the approaches are various monoliths of abstract shapes and diverse sizes, some over six feet high, that keep watch over the land of their ancestors. Upon entering the central square, the sense of totemic presence gives way to whimsy as the eye spies a giant fruit bowl of granite overflowing with huge oranges and lemons harvested not from trees but from the bowels of the earth, their colors slightly faded from being exposed to the harsh southern light. A short distance away, in a park ringed with oleanders, whose vivid display of color and dense foliage contrasts sharply with the seared trunks of palms and the spindly yellow-green offshoots of papyri, stand more of Sciola's sculptures, their bluish-black tinge imparting a complementarity to the color scheme of a civic landscape. Freestanding obelisks in sharp verticality and lintel-like configurations hinting at further mysteries beyond the threshold are interspersed with fluid curvilinear shapes seemingly reclining upon a tree trunk or delicately framing a clump of papyri. Occasionally, hewn rocks are spaced in a circle or a group, not unlike Stonehenge, suggesting ancient rites and a space of ritual communion or, simply, a gathering of stones. At the far end of the park sits an outdoor miniature auditorium, its stage, proscenium arch, and semi-circular seating arrangement sculpted out of massive blocks of stone. It is evident that Sciola's artistic engagement is two-fold-employing civic space as a site for his work (a permanent installation deliberately eschewing the museum0 35 sited installation), and at the same time retaining in individual pieces aspects of artistry that continue a dialogue with many of the tenets of modernism. The civic nature ofhis work is further evident when, back in town, one notices the murals that are displayed along the walled exteriors, above the doors, and along the windowsills of houses in San Sperate. It was a consequence of several trips Sciola made in the seventies to Mexico, where he studied with Siqueiros and other Mexican muralists, and transplanted the technique to his native town. Many of the murals are figurative and employ religious or secular narratives (quite a few were executed by the townspeople under Sciola's guidance), others display vegetative forms or abstract shapes derived from nature. On the one hand, obviously, the murals partake of a folkloristic tendency, but from a larger perspective they extend Sciola's engagement with art within a broader context. It has to do with impregnating the natural landscape (including human habitats) with the markings of the human hand. His purpose is to create environments as art, and not merely environments where art can be situated. In this respect, Sciola's strategies have much in common with the works of the ancients (in the sixties and seventies, he had spent time visiting Altamira, the Easter Islands, Peru, and Africa), particularly in their constructions of sites of religious worship or communal meeting places. They impart to spaces a sense of awe and ritual significance that is in keeping with the uses to which such spaces are employed by the community at large. And if, in our secular age, much of the mystery is perforce diminished or hardly evoked, the mere presence of art on these walls suggest a magic, a symbolic longing, a unity, as it were, between quotidian lives and the hold of the unknown, the poetic, and the imaginary. One might say that Sciola is furthering...