Conversation with Time

Colloquio col Tempo, or Conversation with time, is an assembly of three dissimilarly shaped vertical tablets. They consist of bronze and copper plates and resemble the pages of a book. Each layer was cast separately and worked in various ways with notches, bulges and holes to create an irregular surface. The combination of varnished, polished and plain elements creates a…

Colloquio col Tempo, or Conversation with time, is an assembly of three dissimilarly shaped vertical tablets. They consist of bronze and copper plates and resemble the pages of a book. Each layer was cast separately and worked in various ways with notches, bulges and holes to create an irregular surface. The combination of varnished, polished and plain elements creates a lively interplay of colours and heightens the expressive power of the material. The frontal presentation gives the shallow sculpture the look of a relief. With this abstract sculpture Pietro Consagra is setting up a colloquio or conversation, an exchange of ideas. According to him it consists of different components: 20% knowing what you want to talk about, 20% understanding what your goal is, 20% not listening to the person you’re talking to, 20% contradiction, 15% misunderstanding, and 5% unforeseen factors [Apollonio, p. 19]. According to the sculptor, the starting point is the idea of a collection of memories. Time moulds your mode of thought. Colloquio col Tempo looks like the frontal projection of a fascinating conversation, or an inner dialogue with time, with stratification and colliding ideas. The most important feature of the Colloqui, of which Consagra has made a whole series since 1952, is that they are almost two-dimensional and face the front. The lack of three dimensions is counterbalanced by the multiplication of the layers, the bulging shapes and the fall of light. The frontal arrangement creates a confrontation, a tête-à-tête, a spiritual dialogue with the viewer. Despite its non-figurative nature, this work evokes relationships and confrontations between people and between man and his surroundings. The Italian sculptor is part of the postwar avant-garde. His abstract art is permeated with radical left-wing and revolutionary ideas. The avant-garde regarded figurative art and the concept of ‘realism,’ as sterile and academic, unsuited for a socially progressive society. They placed the accent on the form in art, but rejected a content-free, purely decorative formalism. Consagra wanted to express the problems of his day in a plastic form. A design for Colloquio col Tempo is part of a series of drawings that Consagra included in his book La città frontale of 1969, with the caption: ‘Città come argomento delle emozioni umane’ (‘City as ground for human emotions’). In the book the Sicilian collected together his projects and theories about the construction of an ideal and humane city. In 1970 he was asked to work on the reconstruction of the Sicilian city of Gibellina, which was destroyed in an earthquake in 1968. Between 1954 and 1956 Pietro Consagra participated in the Venice Biennale 11 times, was also in Kassel, and exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Between 1953 and 1973 the internationally fêted artist was the guest at several of the Biennales of the Middelheimmuseum. Walther Vanbeselaere, then director of the KMSKA, spotted the sculpture Colloquio col Tempo in Consagra’s one-man show in the Brussels Palais des Beaux-Arts in 1958, and bought it for a museum gallery that was to be devoted to avant-garde art.