Arnaldo Pomodoro in the Gardens of the Royal Palace in Paris

This book, which documents the anthological retrospective held in 2002 in the gardens of the Palais-Royal in Paris, traces almost forty years in the career of the master from Pesaro Arnaldo Pomodoro through forty of the artist's monumental sculptures created between 1962 and 2000. The sculptures demonstrate the extraordinary continuity of a body of work dealing with the eternal human mystery.
The sculptures, which have an unmistakable style, are characterised by the strength of pure form and the reflecting splendour of metals with their smooth and polished surfaces that split open in crevices and craters.
As explained by Pierre Restany in his essay, the work of Arnaldo Pomodoro gives the surrounding space an undeniable and definitive monumental presence. The secret of the artist's spontaneous communicability resides in the happy marriage of two exceptional skills: the strength in formal terms of the geometric sculptor melding with the profound humanity of the cuneiform carver. Columns, sceptres, obelisks and stelae, discs and spheres are the emblematic volumes which carry a basic language made up of elemental and essential signs On the body of the exterior volumes in smooth bronze, incisions and indentations appear in linear, horizontal and repetitive sequences. When these sign systems appear at the surface or on other discs or stelae, we experience the strange sensation of being in the presence of an extinct or unknown language whose deciphering code we have lost; nonetheless we can, via the analysis and distribution of graphic frequencies, reconstruct the elements of the syntactical rhythms Arnaldo Pomodoro's sculpture-symbols speak to us of the fundamental problems of human existence, of the origin and end of the world. They take on the totality of our anxieties in the face of a threatening world, but they also praise our awareness of being part of this world. Their mysterious language breaks organised formulae in order to directly stimulate our deep intuitions.