There is something that Arcangelo Sassolino said on the preview day (6 June) of his first Australian exhibition, in the end, the beginning, that has stuck with this reviewer. As compared to the precarious, explosive and sometimes threatening presence of his works that test the boundaries of materiality, the artist himself is softly spoken and sensitive, with an easy, yet shy, smile.
In an interview with ArtsHub, standing inside the dungeon-like atmosphere of Mona’s interior, Sassolino used two words to capture the state of our existence in his eyes – “wonder” and “absurdity”.
With in the end, the beginning, nothing is stable. Materials are in flux, the reality of their being constantly questioned or threatened.
Take the paradoxical nature of life (2018), where a sheet of glass bends under the weight of a boulder, achieving temporary equilibrium. The tension is palpable and, yet, the release that humans so crave when we imagine the worst is not there.
On the other hand, things do break in violenza casuale (2008-25), but the process is excruciatingly slow. Bit by bit, a block of timber gives under the forcible pressure of a hydraulic cylinder, and the process heightens awareness around the details of destruction: the earthy and sharp smell of shining gum (Eucalyptus nitens – Sassolino’s choice of local wood for the Hobart iteration), the creaking sound as it splinters and snaps, and the sight of moisture being pressed out from the beam like tears.
The potency of this work is especially heightened in Tasmania, where the logging of forest habitats persists. The irony of human cognisance is that we can easily become desensitised towards mass destruction, but harm towards individuals, including when it can be described as almost tortuous in the context of violenza casuale (translated to English as ‘random violence’), often hits harder and prompts us to see the larger picture.
Sassolino’s manipulation of time runs throughout in the end, the beginning, the title itself suggests a shift in the logics of time, and this is no more prominent than in its namesake centrepiece. The installation is a continuation of the artist’s 2022 Venice Biennale project for the Malta Pavilion, then named Diplomazija Astuta (Cunning Diplomacy). Arguably, the work has departed from its original context and been given a completely new life at Mona.
The added glass panels and enclosed viewing space have allowed Sassolino’s sparks of 1500-degree Celsius molten steel to explode when coming into contact, rather than fizzling out as it did in the ponds of water in Venice. But even so, your heart skips a beat when the sparks fly, making them all the more irresistible. With the piece running on a loop of no particular sequence, time here becomes ambiguous, malleable even, just like the steel that turns from solid to liquid, to pure balls of energy and light.
Elsewhere in a room with two rotating wheels of rich red and blue, no memory without loss (2025), Sassolino surrenders control to the material itself. A mixture of industrial oil and colour – thicker than paint and almost like slime – the liquid chooses its own trajectory upon the discs in perpetual motion – resisting the pull of gravity or giving in to splat on a jagged plate of metal below. It’s uncertain whether the process is one of the artwork’s becoming, or undoing. It can be said that Sassolino intentionally achieves this middle ground.
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in the end, the beginning won’t fit into everyone’s description of a ‘blockbuster’, and yet Mona is one of the few institutions that can bring works of this scale and consequence to the public sphere. It requires deep collaboration and openness between the team and the artist to happen, and is more of a no-frills exhibition than one might expect, because the artworks bring enough weight and dramatic energy themselves.
Perhaps one can never fully comprehend the absurdity and wonder of life, but at least here, there’s the possibility of contemplating such thoughts, mesmerised by the sudden sparks that spring from the void of unpredictability.
Arcangelo Sassolino: in the end, the beginning is on view at Mona until 6 April 2026; free with museum entry.
This writer travelled to Hobart as a guest of Mona.
