Concentric Trails

The Sicilian Cappello began modelling according to the vibrant sensitivity of the young artists who were reacting against the turgidity of the Novecento; a later familiarity with the forms of Moore made him alive to a more acute spatial problematic, especially in the dialectical relationship between hollow spaces and negative volumes. It was from 1955 that Cappello abandoned the closed plastic forms of traditional statuary to attempt a new and freer investigation of space, which has gradually abandoned every remaining allusion to naturalistic forms. The curved line is the essential component of Cappello's expression: not an outline, and therefore subordinate to a description, but an autonomous dynamic element, a timbral scansion of elementary geometric forms.