Critics
Aricò has just turned fifty.Behind him in
not only an intense and successful career, but also a whole series
of daring large works in concrete, bronze, and as we shall see
various other materials, each cleverly exploited for its expressive
potential. When still only thirty, the artist was making large
sculptures for places where the striking position of the work
required a keen awareness of its relation with space and light.
These sculptures were often linked to celebratory or symbolic
themes and the artist had to balance the large scale with the
direct expressiveness of the image. Aricò is a self-composed
artist. He speaks the language of his time, avoiding preciousness
and naivety, and above all the eschews intellectual captiousness.
He is clearly a very responsive and problematic figure, but has
no intention of flaunting his inner feelings (they are buried
in his works as a secret or almost pure force). Rather, he interprets
collective feelings and emotions in such a concise and robust
way that they match up to the complexity and loftiness of the
subject. Identifying, on one hand, with the human and historical
reasons for events or gestures, he seeks in his themes for the
motivations of warm domesticity without ever allowing formal abstraction
to drain them of their vitality. But, on the other hand, he also
stands aside as a spectator to grasp the emotional suggestiveness
that tends to simplify flows of episodes and feelings into a single
impact. In this way he has always managed to arrive at the right
balance between interest in the individual and the need - or will
to supply collective interpretations of human events. In the early
works there is an expressive passion that tends to tormented traits
and modes. But this soon develops into a sparer language with
primitivist connotations. In those years European, and particular
Italian, sculpture was going through a phase of great formal experimentation.
At the same time, especially in Italy there was still a very strong
influence from the naturalist- archaic figurative model which
reaches its apex with Martini and Marini. The sensitive young
Aricò assimilated these lessons and stimuli. But he reworked
them with an eye to Moore and was mindful of the stark concision
of Barlach. He never sought for pure formalism (as often happened
in a number of disciples who reduce the lessons of their masters
to questions of style). His working method would seem to be to
bring all the factors to bear in a kind of meditative brilliance;
he then reduces structures to essential shapes, but just when
the overall image verges on the totally abstract, he reintroduces
a subdued and powerful pathos which restores the faces on the
figures to the condition of human physiognomies.