Work: Sudden Night

Description

“…his characters, between symbol and truth, live and throb in search of a foundation where to root, which however always flees on a slippery and treacherous slope; they’re real people always on the edge between concreteness and instability”, Aldo Grassini.

“Sudden Night” is a terracotta sculpture created by Paolo Annibali in 2008. It is one of a series of 4 works, all in the same format, on display at the Museo Omero. These four terracotta sculptures are cubes with sides of about 32 centimetres. In each of these cubes, the surface facing the observer is carved out, as if to create a theatrical scene inside the block of clay.

In this sculpture we are inside a room with three walls; on each wall there is a woman giving her back to the observer. She is looking outside of awindow with her elbows resting on the windowsill. At the centre of the scene, on the floor, there is a sleeping dog. The three women are barefoot and wear knee-long skirts and long-sleeved blouses; their hair are slightly above shoulder length. From the windows we can see and touch small undulatedmasses of clay representing stormy clouds.

In this case, like for the other works in the series, a storm that threatens the quiet of people is the recurring theme. However, in this case the atmosphere is more serene than in the other works and we can feel a sense of expectation more than a sense of imminent danger.

The clay, which is tepid and slightly rough to the touch, is glazed: red is the predominant colour for the sky and the walls of the house, whereas beige is that for the three women, and dark blue for the floor and the dog.

Clay is this artist’s preferred material. “My days”, he says, “are structured by the rigour of sculpting which, as a non-docile discipline, dictates the rhythms of my doing. (…) Clay, which at a glance looks so docile to the caresses of our fingers, requires a deep understanding of thickness, pull-backs… if we don’t want to fail”.