Arcangelo Sassolino’s in the end, the beginning is a visceral, precarious and dangerously compelling experience. Curated by Sarah Wallace, Jarrod Rawlins and Olivier Varenne, the exhibition’s genesis occurred in 2022, when MONA’s Founder David Walsh encountered Sassolino’s Diplomazija astuta at the Malta Pavilion during the Venice Biennale. Sassolino elaborates, “The exhibition was then born out of an intense exchange of proposals, ideas, images, architectural plans.” Comprising six significant sculptures – some kinetic – the exhibition is a dialogue between art and physics, where force, tension, speed, heat and gravity are harnessed and materials pushed to their breaking points.
MONA’s subterranean architectural spaces provided the ideal platform for Sassolino’s concept, particularly the reimagining of Diplomazija astuta intended to evoke the chiaroscuro of the Italian master Caravaggio and his painting The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist. The journey within unfolds like a carefully choreographed descent into material vulnerability and increasing tension. Upon entry, audiences encounter the paradoxical nature of life, 2023, where a massive granite boulder rests precariously on a sheet of glass, presented as a bed-like platform. The glass bends visibly under its weight and could shatter at any given moment. “The work functions like a countdown mechanism,” Sassolino explains. “You don’t know if it will last another five minutes or five hundred years. That ambiguity creates a real emotional response.”
Adjacent installations amplify this sense of suspended catastrophe further. In marcus, 2018 Pirelli tires are compressed and warped out of shape by a steel beam or vise, rendering them redundant. To the right, no memory without loss, 2025 features two three-metre discs that rotate slowly on the wall, dripping oil pigment in deep sanguine red, in an homage to the tonality of Italian old masters.
Intriguingly, the artist’s process balances rigorous testing with calculated risk. “There’s always a mix,” he states. “Some works are carefully tested in the studio with engineers and technicians, and we know exactly their limits. But other sculptures resist calculation, their behaviour can only be understood empirically, once they’re installed in the exhibition space.” This embrace of uncertainty extends to the viewing experience itself. “I like to think that something could happen while the viewer is present,” Sassolino reflects, “that the work holds a potential for change, rupture, or collapse.”
Moments of silence or stillness are disrupted by intense noise throughout the exhibition. Sassolino states, “I’m drawn to moments where tension builds, where time becomes thick, almost material. It’s not just about observing, but about staying with the work, inhabiting that suspended moment.” Towards the exhibition’s end, violenza casuale, 2008-2025 is presented. Here, wooden beams bound by steel cables are continuously crushed by hydraulic pressure, their splintering audible at times throughout the spaces in a haunting soundscape.
Sassolino’s careful orchestration of tension reaches its crescendo with the exhibition’s title piece. Molten steel, heated to 1500°C, transforms the final space into a spectacle of dazzling awe and very real threat of danger. Cascading from multiple points in the ceiling in a shower of glowing metal sparks and light onto the floor, the steel dances, bounces and travels throughout space, crackling with energy and force. Positioned behind glass, the work is confined. Sassolino reflects, “It’s incredible how many different materials, like steel, glass or stone, could come to life. Every material has a peculiar way to be activated.”
Of the exhibition’s premise, Director of Curatorial Affairs, Jarrod Rawlins states, “These works are extremely humanising. They remind us that our emotional response to vulnerability is not a weakness, but rather a fundamental condition of being human.” Further, Sassolino’s exploration of mechanics and technology creates new meanings and possibilities for sculpture, where the risk of the work’s collapse is a fundamental aspect. Reinforcing a reflection on time is also an integral part of the experience. Sassolino states: “Time is something that corrodes, accumulates, and eventually gives way. Materials often behave like time itself, slipping, eroding, collapsing. There is a quiet violence in this. A sense that we are all living within countdowns, ecological, political, personal.” In confronting the limits of matter itself, Sassolino’s sculptures become mirrors for our own impermanence, transforming MONA’s spaces into chambers where fragility, unpredictability and tension dance on the brink of collapse.
