This show marked Carl Andre’s return to the Rome gallery scene after an absence of some years, and in it he showed a single sculpture, Massicciata, 1984. It is his first work in travertine, a common stone in the architecture and sculpture of this city, to which he thus seemed to pay homage. A visit by Andre to Tivoli, not far from Rome, provided inspiration for the piece; the road to Tivoli passes by several travertine quarries, and in one of these the sculpture was realized. Travertine is distinctive in that it is both hard and porous; it has a ridged, irregular surface, pocked with veinlike

In 1982 Toti Scialoja’s work was known for the way he dealt with surface, using subtle washes of watercolor, fluid but veiled whites, and progressive erasures to convey an intimate, private, nearly hidden emotionality. That same year, in Madrid, he saw Goya’s devastating paintings in the Quinta del Sordo. Now he seems to have absorbed Goya’s furious, dark gesture—antinaturalistic and derived from the baroque, but pushed toward decomposition through its almost excessive lucidity and obsessive, searing truth. It would not be inappropriate to use the word “enlightenment,” in its prophetic sense,