Horseman

The union of man and animal is indeed perhaps one of the most ancient and most frequently recurring images to which the poetic imagination has applied itself. By taking it up so assiduously, Marini was simply restating, beyond any illustrative or anecdotal dispersion, the problem of all his sculpture: to fix an image in which the geometric envelope and the substance of the object are welded together in a circle of unfailing necessity. The sculptural theme of the man on horseback combines, in a complex range of cases, static (horizontal forms) and dynamic (vertical forms) potentialities. Between the extreme poles of a motionless architecture and an exasperated agitation, the solutions to this primordial antagonism range from the powerful assurance of the Rotterdam bronze, through the panic physicality of the small group of 1947, to the tragic majesty of the Swiss wooden figure.