Federico Brook and his clouds

What is the artist waiting for more than lightness?
Against the seriousness of the world – an inextricable case, a norm that wears down and tightens, closed destiny, anxious desire. What more than reinventing the possible and probable, but also chasing and expressing the speed of the idea, the vagueness of the dream? And all in an elsewhere where space and time, fear and brevity, joy and sorrow are lit by a pure, impalpable life, but the most solid and lasting.
And it is not thanks to an achieved and restrained lightness that the cosmological machines of Federico Brook, his steel joints, his bronzes, his marbles, the many materials more and less serious of his sculptures communicate wonder and amazement? Who impresses movement and shape with rotating geometries, obelisks, pyramids, bas-reliefs, in so much presence reveals and reveals the unpredictability of adventure, the pleasure of play, the thrill of approaching being and to see the mysterious symmetries .
Nor is it enough, for Frederick Brook has made the lightness even more evident-attaching clouds to his monuments, posing them like corollas bloomed by stony uspid, like suffused halos. And those suspended shapes in turn suspend any consistency.
Passing the air and the sky, infinitely changeable creatures, now the clouds return in colored sheets, in the colors that intertwine and flake, and hint, allude, show.
Veils, nenibi, vapors, heaps, layers, light, scattered, veering ragne. Iridescent, mother-of-pearl, noctilucent, reddish, thick, iridescent, the clouds of our days and nights become – in the vision of Brook aspects of luminance, phantoms of the atmosphere, animals roaming the moon fields, walls chipped between the stars, darting metersore, faces feet hands loose in unlimited freedom, for a journey without goals.
An indescribable joy accompanies and governs these works: in them the light collects and expands for particles that are composed and decomposed without posing. Their subject is that of the universe that revolves generating and erasing universes and is opacity and brightness, fullness and emptiness. Their energy is the secret instrument that investigates existence and abandons itself by floating. The deepest shadow and the most extensive splendor are interpenetrated and confused. Infinite corpuscles – which welcome in themselves the loss and the find, the labyrinth and; the exit – they cross like arteries now surfacing now submerged. Thus, a cosmogony: where the clouds no longer have links with the planet of men, because they transport it and raise it in an extreme fluid significance. Then even more the hand of the great architect retains and reaches their plot; not even more restless the multiplicity of their appearance, their resemblance to our desires and our expectations.
In their interminable journey, in their infinite mutability, perhaps they are – as Borges already knew – “less vain than the man who aims at them”. It is perhaps the never stopping theater, the most true and enjoyable, of our brief restless stay.

 

Elio Pecora