“I often think of the image of the confessional,” Nunzio told an interviewer in 1995, describing the way a confessional grate isolates the voice and transforms it into a material presence, “as though it were a sculpture.” In the sculptor’s most recent work, Avaton, 2007, dialogue becomes a tangible form. Wooden rods are stacked in crisscrossed layers to create a massive curved wall. The rich velvet black of Avaton’s concave side, burned by the artist with painstaking care using a blowtorch, embraces the visitor on his entrance. At first, it is as though the viewer were one of the initiated few, granted access to the sacred, forbidden space that the Greek term avaton defines; yet the viewer is not at the center of a protective cincture but amid a semicircle that leaves his back exposed to the street beyond the gallery’s floor-to-ceiling windows. Avaton’s convex side, on the other hand, pushes the viewer up against the gallery’s walls, inducing a palpable sense of the room’s limits. This side of the free-standing sculpture is alive: It retains the ocher hues of the wood grain, and the heads of the jutting rods glitter, mosaiclike, with acid greens, fluorescent pinks, and lemon yellows. Salvaged from a lumberyard, the rods were once used in the aging process as both separators between wooden boards and as color indicators of the species the boards belonged to. Though not common to his practice, found materials were also Nunzio’s chosen medium in a recent project for Turin’s Giorgio Persano, in which the artist exhibited two small shacks he came across while traversing the Croatian countryside to purchase timber. Pavement and roof removed, the shacks were stripped down to their sides, their interior walls burned. Inside and outside, light and dark, empty and full, protection and exposure—in Nunzio’s work, a concept can only be understood in the company of its opposite. Avaton’s curve echoes with the words of the master carpenter of the Taoist Zhuangzi, “Everyone sees the usefulness of the useful, but no one knows the usefulness of the useless.” Such is the privileged knowledge of the elect, the artists.
