Some sculptures invite quiet contemplation. Others demand reverence. Arcangelo Sassolino’s works, however, offer no such refuge. They are neither passive nor polite. Instead, they are visceral, volatile, and unrelenting - forces in motion, poised at the edge of collapse. In IN THE END, THE BEGINNING, opening this winter at MONA (Museum of Old and New Art) in Tasmania, Sassolino presents a series of kinetic and elemental experiments, where materials are tested, strained, and ultimately undone.
The title itself suggests a paradox - an ouroboros of creation and destruction, where dissolution is not an endpoint but a threshold. Steel will melt. Glass will bend. Wood will splinter. The forces that shape these materials - gravity, pressure, heat - become the unseen protagonists, sculpting, deconstructing, and transforming before our eyes.
Tension and the Theatrics of Ruin
Walking into Sassolino’s exhibition is like stepping into a high-stakes laboratory - one where industrial materials teeter on the brink of failure. This is not art that simply exists; it happens.
A hydraulic piston methodically crushes wooden beams, their splintering echoing through the gallery like distant gunfire. A truck tyre, compressed to near breaking point, embodies a strange tension - its familiar form grotesquely distorted, an object caught between its past function and impending collapse. In another installation, twin metal discs, thick with industrial oil, spin in slow, hypnotic surrender to gravity’s inevitable pull.
Then, there is the fire.
From the ceiling of an entire gallery, molten steel, heated to an infernal 1500°C, rains down in fiery droplets. The room flickers with fleeting constellations - metal transfigured into liquid, then into light. Here, Sassolino plays with the same elemental drama that captivated the likes of Caravaggio, whose stark contrasts of light and shadow framed stories of violence, martyrdom, and redemption. At the 2022 Venice Biennale, Sassolino reinterpreted The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist in this very medium: a cascade of molten metal evoking the moment of severance, the irrevocable shift from one state to another.
His work at MONA extends this fascination, but with an eye toward the future rather than the past. In a world undergoing its own violent shifts - ecological, political, existential - Sassolino’s sculptures remind us that transformation is not always gentle.
Entropy as a Creative Force
Sassolino does not sculpt in the traditional sense. He does not carve, nor does he mold. Instead, he engineers situations - moments where materials are pushed to their limits, where order fractures into chaos, where destruction reveals new forms.
A sheet of glass, suspended under the weight of a looming boulder, bows under pressure, caught in the exquisite agony of near-collapse. It is a balancing act with no happy ending - only inevitability.
But Sassolino’s vision is not purely one of devastation. Like the forest fire that paves the way for new growth, or the molten lava that hardens into fertile land, destruction in his world is simply another form of creation. The violence we witness is not senseless; it is the fundamental process by which all things evolve.
In this way, his work serves as both spectacle and allegory. It mirrors our own impermanence - our own flashes in the dark. It reminds us that even the hardest, most rigid things - steel, glass, certainty - are never as immutable as they seem.
The Weight of the Unseen
Perhaps what makes Sassolino’s work so compelling is its ability to render the invisible visible. We do not often think about the forces that govern the objects around us - the quiet pull of gravity, the tension hidden within rigid structures, the heat energy stored in metal. But in IN THE END, THE BEGINNING, these forces become palpable, undeniable.
We see the exact moment a material can no longer hold its shape. We feel the anticipation as destruction looms. We witness the instant where something ceases to be what it was and becomes something else entirely.
It is a reminder that nothing is truly static. Change will come, whether in fire or in fracture. And as Sassolino suggests, perhaps that is where the real beauty lies.
Arcangelo Sassolino - IN THE END, THE BEGINNING
Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), 655 Main Road, Berriedale, Tasmania 7011, Australia
7 June 2025 - 6 April 2026
Experiments with change, force, and very, very hot steel. Things will break.
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Words by AW.
Photo courtesy of Museum of Old and New Art.