With Present Tense, Arcangelo Sassolino (b. 1967, Vicenza) delivers a radical meditation on time considered not as a linear metric, but as an unstable, unpredictable force that traverses and transforms matter. The exhibition, hosted at Galleria Continua in San Gimignano, unfolds through a series of installation-based works where sculpture abandons its traditional stasis and engages instead with duration, risk and metamorphosis. At the core of the project there is not form, but process: becoming. Long engaged in a practice that intersects art, engineering and physics, Sassolino shifts here from the more explosive and violent mechanics of his earlier production toward a slower, visceral dynamic, which is no less unsettling.
Arcangelo Sassolino, “Present Tense”, installation view, Galleria Continua San Gimignano, 2025, © photo Ela Bialkowska OKNO studio, courtesy Galleria Continua
Industrial oil – shapeless, dense, alive – emerges as a new language through which to question presence, gravity, inertia. This is no longer mechanical violence but friction, slippage, silent tension: the artwork becomes organism, environment, event – unfolding in time and resisting capture by memory or image. Far from the mechanical aggression of previous works – hydraulic presses pushing metal to the point of collapse, bullets fired through air – Sassolino adopts a subtler but equally physical register, where force manifests as slow movement and latent potential. Oil is not just material, but time made visible: it drips, accumulates, pulses, tracing paths that escape control, generating unpredictable forms that persist only for a moment before mutating again.
Arcangelo Sassolino, “Present Tense”, 2025, industrial oil, steel, electrical system, 300 cm diameter, Galleria Continua, 2025, © photo Ela Bialkowska OKNO studio
For Sassolino, the present is not a fixed point but a volatile condition – an intermediate state between what is about to be and what has already passed, the ungraspable passage where matter changes phase. As the artist himself has stated, he is fascinated by “the instant of transformation” – that threshold where something becomes something else, without yet being fully formed. This shift is expressed through a formal language that destabilizes the idea of composition. The installations do not assert themselves through monumentality, but through ambiguity: one never knows if they are beginning or ending, emerging from chaos or dissolving into it. Yet behind each element lies precise engineering, developed in collaboration with chemists to produce custom oil viscosities and test the limits of matter without ever freezing it in a definitive image.
Arcangelo Sassolino, “Impartial silence”, 2025, granite, glass and steel, 165 x 83 x 45 cm, Galleria Continua, 2025, © photo Ela Bialkowska OKNO studio
Present Tense does not narrate, does not represent, it acts. It compels the viewer to dwell in a time that is neither past nor future, but present as transformation. The exhibition moves slowly, but inexorably, like the oil that runs through it: a restless, living body slipping between the visible and the conceptual, between control and its inevitable dissolution. In an age saturated with instantaneous imagery, Sassolino reclaims the value of what cannot be fixed, of what happens and vanishes in the moment it reveals itself. His is a sculpture of time, of waiting, of gravity. A gesture that, like the present, exists only in the act of being crossed.
Info:
Arcangelo Sassolino. Present Tense
03/05 – 31/08/2025
Galleria Continua
Piazza della cisterna, 26 – San Gimignano (SI)
www.galleriacontinua.com
Art Curator and Art Advisor, graduated in Visual Arts and Cultural Mediation, with Master in Curatorial Practices, born in 1995, lives in Naples. He collaborates with Galleries and Independent Spaces, his research is mainly focused on Emerging Painting, with a careful and inclined gaze also on other forms of aesthetic language.
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