In the two main works comprising “Critical Mass,” his first solo exhibition in Germany, Italian artist Arcangelo Sassolino turns engineering devices into uncanny, subversively destructive objects. Sassolino employs physical forces—tension, weight, pressure—in ways that emphasize their destructive potential as partly controllable yet unpredictable. Made with help from engineers, Aphasia II, 2008, for example, consists of two steel end pieces of pipes used to channel gas, welded together to form a small rounded object encapsulating 250 bars of nitrogen (which is equivalent to nearly 750 cubic feet of space and around 700 tons of potential energy). The work refers to Marcel Duchamp’s bottled Air de Paris, 1919, as the press material notes, but replaces its fragile, almost romantic poetry with a machine aesthetic and a force that, if released, would blow up the gallery and its surroundings. The second work on view, Untitled, 2008, is a kinetic sculpture comprising a high-powered hydraulic piston that, when activated by the viewer’s presence, slowly and persistently pushes into the wooden block to which it is attached by steel cables. First, one hears eerie cracking sounds, then sharp splinters burst free as the block bends and ultimately breaks. The speed and results of the destruction vary according to what type of wood is used. It’s a fascinating yet disturbing demonstration that implicates the viewer in the process of machine defeating nature.
