Bob Orton ’96, 1996

Wood, cardboard, sand and paint, 42×45,5×24 cm
Mauro Staccioli Archive Museum, Volterra

The irregular, thin, soaring and bright red triangle appears as an exclamation mark but also acts as an element of solicitation, as a questioning provoked by the sculpture’s apparent precarious balance. An example of the application of this form is given by the intervention that Staccioli made in 1990 at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Gwacheon, Seoul: an identifying sign for the Korean museum balanced suspended at a point on the outer, curved line of the building, which is placed on the top of a verdant slope from which the plastic intervention with its bright red stands out. The museum thus becomes a work of art itself and prefigures the idea of beauty that it contains. A few years later, in 1996, the irregular triangle is proposed once again in the intervention he realizes for Bob Orton’s Californian villa. This time the sculpture is placed in relation to a garden hedge.

© Enrico Fontolan, Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Insitute, Roma. Sergio Borghesi. Courtesy Archivio Mauro Staccioli.