Medardo Rosso

Medardo Rosso sustained a concept of sculpture related to the idea of the suspended instant and of apparition, which in the last instance denoted immateriality and timelessness. This implied an alliance with surrounding matter and an inevitable tendency towards its dissolution in light energy. This does not mean, however, that he denied sculpture its material entity, on the contrary, he recognised the quality of matter as the crucible for all forms rather than its subordination to a kind of formal solidification of fiction. He therefore championed a kind of sculpture which, having an immaterial bias, was more visual than tactile and with regard to which the observer’s point of view was an essential aspect.

The fact that his fame and universality are recognised only in relatively reduced circles is the best evidence of the fact that what began as a kind of conspiracy to silence his unquestionable worth with very immediate objectives in mind has resulted in a grave omission from the history of art, repeated ad nauseam with the utmost triteness.

Gloria Moure, currently director of the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, offers a comprehensive view of the work of Medardo Rosso. Besides an abundance of visual information, including most of Rosso’s own photographs, hitherto unpublished, the book features interesting theoretical contributions from Francisco Calvo Serraller, Luciano Caramel and Gloria Moure herself, accompanied by a manifesto by Boccioni which constitutes an unequivocal statement of the sculptor’s worth, echoed in the texts by present-day sculptors such as Giovanni Anselmo, Tony Cragg, Luciano Fabro, Juan Muñoz and Thomas Schütte, alongside a careful selection of articles and letters by the artist which brings us into his way of understanding his art or, which amounts to the same thing, his life.