| joe fiorello | |||||||||||||
| Joe Fiorello is a sculptor/painter who lives and works in Truro, MA and Sarasota, Florida. He has created figurative images in welded steel, sculptures which resemble masks or trophies. Most of the sculptures he makes are close to life size, just slightly larger than human scale. This is a size in which he feels most comfortable working. The works are commanding yet not overwhelming. The masks evoke an emotional tie to the past, the present and yet one might feel that they have a sense of the future as well. They are not unlike line drawings in that they use the negative space around the physical piece to create an overall shape. The sculptures are made of found materials. Like bone fragments found on the beach, these steel fragments are the offal of industry. They are scraps salvaged from the building of high-rise, high-end apartment buildings lining the west coast of Florida, where he spends his winters. Because the Florida housing market has slumped in the past few years these towers are often left empty, uninhabited. Those that were displaced cannot afford to move into these luxury waterfront buildings. Similarly when Fiorello was a child, his grandparents and parents were displaced from Boston’s West End after the BRA took possession of an entire neighborhood. It was the most eclectic neighborhood in the city where ethnic and racial boundaries were invisible. High-rises replaced brick row houses and tenement buildings leaving residents to move to lower priced neighborhoods outside of the city. He and his family were part of that migration. His earliest recollections of making art is building sculptures from machined steel and brass as he entertained himself in his father’s lab at MIT. It was at that lab where the guidance systems for the Apollo Space missions and Poseidon Explorer submarines were built. Fiorello made assemblages from both wood and clay until the early 1990’s. He returned to working in metal for his thesis project in art school. Later he was influenced by a show called Picasso and the Age of Iron at The Guggenheim museum in New York, where the works of David Smith, Julio Gonzales and Picasso were shown together for a magnificent display of early 20th Century steel sculpture. It was here that he decided that welded steel would work well as his medium. Joe is not the first sculptor in his family. His great grandfather, Pasquale Fiorello, and his great uncle Giuseppe Fiorello were both liturgical sculptors in Sicily. Together they created numerous works used in churches throughout Sicily. He visited several of his ancestors’ homes in Sicily in 2007. Sicily is rich in Greek antiquities. Joe has always been fascinated and influenced by Greek sculpture and architecture. He spent two summers Greece in the 1970’s where he was able to view first hand, Cycladic and Minoan sculptures and artifacts as found in the ruins near Knossos, Agios Nicholaus and Glyfada on Crete. He has admired the simplicity and form of these early sculptures and the minimal shapes and mass which have influenced his work. Other artists he finds have influenced his work are Louise Nevelson, Martin Puryear and Donald Judd.
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