Omphalos II

The idea of center as origin, the place from which infinite directions depart, or the infinitely small vanishing point, is found in the iron scultpure Omphalos,[read more=”Read More”less=”Read Less”]a series of ink drawings with the same title, and La freccia che colpisce il bersaglio vola per sempre, a sculpture in white terracotta whose four parts are, in turn, composed of a series of concentric sub-parts sloping towards the inside to form a sort of visual vortex. Omphalos is a word from ancient Greek meaning “navel,” but also umbilical cord, the center of the Earth. The omphalos is the center of the human body, but it is also, significantly, a scar that bears witness to the moment in which we were separated from the maternal body that hosted and generated us; it is the tangible sign of a separation, but also of the conquest of an independent life. The reference to the many meanings of this word emerges in two sculptures, one in iron and one in graphite, and their related drawings. In the sculptures the movement of expansion that starts at the center necessarily encounters a limit at the borders of the object, while in the drawings the lines that spread out from the center suggest a potentially infinite movement. Again in these works, it is not so much the natural, the living that is shown and represented. As the artist remarks in his writing, instead it is a question of “to act as nature would, which is also typical of the alchemical process. The alchemist is he who sets out not to reproduce a natural phenomenon in the laboratory, but to pro-duce processes of transmutation according to the ways of nature, attuning soul and body to its way of proceeding”.[/read]

Onphalos. Iron, 24x60x58 cm, 2007 [S0022]