DALLAS - From Brooklyn to Carrara to Dallas and back. About twenty works by Barry X Ball, an American sculptor who uses new technologies to reinterpret and transform Italian sculpture from antiquity to the early 1900s, are on display, for the first time all together, at the Nasher Center, the museum designed by Renzo Piano in Dallas considered among the most important in the world for contemporary sculpture.
In the Old World Ball he visits cathedrals and museums in search of pieces to "appropriate", then, at the foot of the Apuan Alps, he uses technologies of the future to attack the stone. However, when the Californian artist returns the work sketched on the banks of the East River, he rediscovers and applies the patient manual skills of the ancient masters. Pioneer of 3D scanning technology, Ball makes extensive use of computers and numerical control machines. After having scanned the "re-appropriated" works in Europe, he created the sketch delivered to the "sculpting robots" of the TorArt of Carrara (the company that rebuilt the Palmyra Arch after the destruction of ISIS) which brought out the sculpture from the stone block. The work was then finished under the guidance of Ball with traditional techniques in the Greenpoint neighborhood in Brooklyn, in a sculpture workshop considered the most advanced in the world.
It takes ten thousand hours to bring pieces like a new Pieta 'Rondanini to perfection, the sleeping Hermaphrodite of classical age with Bernini's mattress today in the Louvre and the very latest creation, a colossal "San Bartolomeo skinned" from the end work' 500 by Marco Ferrari d'Agrate from the Milan Cathedral. The exhibition includes pieces divided into two series: "Portraits" and "Masterpieces". The "Portraits" are friends, other artists and protagonists of the art world, whose casts become digital scans which are then made into semi-precious materials such as Belgian black marble, calcite and translucent onyxes instead of the opaque marble of the original.
More recently, in collaboration with the jeweler Damiani, Ball is experimenting with portraits inspired by Raimondo di Sangro's "anatomical machines" of the Sansevero Chapel in Naples, in which the physiognomy, rendered in gold and silver, is associated with elements of life of the subject emerging from the tangle of veins of the physiognomy. The "Masterpieces" appropriate icons of art history, from the Hermaphrodite to, closer to us, Boccioni and Medardo Rosso, the latter artist at the center of a tribute by Ball to the last Venice Biennale. The scan, donated to the institutions that granted him access, is the starting point for reinterpretation. Ball "turns" the sculpture digitally transforming his work in the mirror of the original, then accentuates, reduces, eliminates or adds details as in the case of San Bartolomeo in which the skinned head is his self-portrait: a "quote" by Michelangelo who painted his portrait in the skin of San Bartolomeo della Sistina.