Barry X Ball

Sick Child

Medardo Rosso Project

In 2012, I worked with the Vicenza-based technical company, Unocad, to 3D-scan 39 Medardo

Rosso sculptures in the following Italian public collections:

- Ca’ Pesaro Galleria Internazionale d’Arte Moderna – Venezia

- Galleria d’Arte Moderna (GAM) – Milano

- Museo Medardo Rosso – Barzio

I also was granted access to Rosso sculptures in private collections. My great friends, Danila

Marsure, heir to Medardo Rosso and Director of the Archivio Medardo Rosso in Italy, and

Laura Mattioli (collector, curator, scholar, and founder of the Center for Italian Modern Art in

New York), provided generous support and assistance. Gabiella Belli, Director of the

Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, and Elisabetta Barisoni, Director of Ca’ Pesaro Galleria

Internazionale d’Arte Moderna di Venezia, as well as Paola Zatti, Director and Chief Curator of

the Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Milano were also very helpful.

Examples of almost all of Medardo Rosso’s mature works (and multiple versions of some

pieces) were 3-dimensionally scanned. The technicians employed a state-of-the-art

Breuckman white-light scanner to “capture” all sides, surfaces, and volumes of the Rossos. I

concurrently took extensive digital photographs of the sculptures. Utilizing the digital photos as

references, the scan data was subsequently painstakingly refined and “perfected” at my studio

in New York. The resultant virtual models are highly-detailed objective “copies” of the Rossos,

the most precise digital records of the late artist’s works ever produced.

My goal from the beginning of this project has been to utilize this objective, scientific scan data

as a starting point to create poetic new sculptures – sculptures that will retain all the power and

mystery of Medardo Rosso’s while introducing a panoply of subtle alterations that will

profoundly transform them and make them decidedly my works – Barry X Ball originals.

After extensive digital alterations to each Rosso model, my sculptures are CNC (computer-

numerically-controlled) milled from the various exotic translucent stones I have been collecting

for over 25 years – Golden Honeycomb Calcite, pink Iranian onyx, white Iranian onyx,

“wounded” Mexican onyx, ultra-translucent white Mexican onyx – by sophisticated robots.

Medardo created his works additively, by building them up, molding them of wax, plaster, and

clay. I have purposely done the opposite – subtractively realizing my sculptures, precisely

hewing them from stone blocks. The transformation has reversed and bridged the classic

Rodin-versus-Michelangelo (modeling-versus-carving) sculpture division. The reversal is

emphasized by the fact that my sculptures (including Sick Child) are generally “mirror images”

of the Rossos.

My aims are to push Rosso’s famous diaphanous translucency to an extreme, to approach

pure abstraction while still presenting the originals’ figurative elements, and to impart a

transcendent glow to the soft forms. My golden calcite recalls Rosso’s soft yellow wax, my

white onyx his plaster, but the translucency of my chosen stones is far more luminous than

Rosso’s materials. Some of my most delicate Rosso-esque sculptures – based on his thin

bronzes – evince a hyper-compressed three-dimensionality. Some are so thin and translucent

that the contours of their backs are visible through their fronts. The stone venation as well as

the cultivated surface flutes of the robot milling – visually superimposed textural layers – work

in concert with the sculptural forms to create a subtle, dizzyingly lush visual complexity.

I have designed my Medardo Rosso Project works so that they have two primary display

options:

1 – The sculpture / socle-block assemblies are ideally be presented on (and visually hover

above) custom-made polished metal pedestals. The structure of those pedestals is reminiscent

of traditional sculptor stands, the type Rosso often used in the process of creating his works.

But, in keeping with the enhanced ethereality of my sculptures, my pedestals, although

structurally strong, are hyper-delicate in appearance. Their crystalline white Vietnamese

marble elements – panels and socle blocks – reflect light. My goal has been to reduce to a

minimum the visual “weight” of the pedestals’ structures while contributing to the ethereality of

the translucent sculptures they support. Light and levitation were the guiding design principles.

The sculptures can alternately be shown on just the included Vietnamese white marble

socle blocks (which, in-turn, can be placed on a tabletop, cabinet etc.). The socle blocks have

white ABS plastic base plates which prevent scratching / marring of furniture surfaces. The

sculptures are aligned / secured on the socles with included stainless steel pins and sockets.

(If space does not permit the sculptures’ installation on option 1 pedestals, the sculpture / socle

block assemblies can instead be shown on top of “classic” columnar white-lacquered wood

pedestals. Those pedestals are equipped with base weight assemblies and levelers to ensure

stability / verticality, and the marble socles are aligned / secured on the pedestal tops with

included stainless steel pins and sockets.)

My recently-completed 20,000 square foot Brooklyn studio complex was built with a focus on

the creation of stone sculptures. It is the most comprehensive advanced high-tech stone

fabrication facility in the world. The Medardo Rosso Project is the first new body of sculptures

to be realized in this studio. All the preparatory digital work, stone cutting, multi-axis robot

milling, and final hand carving / detailing of my Rosso sculptures is being done there. The

pedestals are fabricated by a studio-coordinated consortium of multiple outside fabricators.

The debut exhibition of my Medardo Rosso Project sculptures was at Ca’ Pesaro International

Gallery of Modern Art in Venice during the 2019 Biennale d’Arte. My subsequent 2020 solo

exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, “Remaking Sculpture” also featured

several of my Rosso works. The spring, 2022, “Cy Twombly / Barry X Ball: A History of

Painting and Sculpture” exhibition at Mignoni Gallery in New York (in conjunction with McCabe

Fine Art) paired my Medardo Rosso Project sculptures with Cy Twombly paintings and works

on paper. My Rosso works have also been shown at multiple art fairs, and in several museum

and gallery group shows.

Sick Child is a prime example of this ongoing series. Realized in translucent golden-pink

“wounded” Mexican onyx (personally sourced by me from the El Marmól quarry in Baja

California), this work is inspired by Rosso’s Enfante Malade, 1893 – 1895, in the collection of

Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milano. The Rosso is a darkly-patinated bronze. My sculpture is

carved from a unique piece of the Mexican onyx, with the subtle venation of the stone

corresponding in its diagonal flow to the poignant tilt of the afflicted child’s head – one thinks of

the tilted head of Christ in crucifixion depictions. The diagonal micro robot-milling ridges,

reminiscent of Egyptian Amarna-period drapery fluting, also echo the head angle while

activating the stone surface. The retained, delicate, penumbral casting-flange “halo”

completes the saintly depiction while serving as a line of separation between the sculpture’s

dramatically contrasting stone character (delicately pristine on the face and violently decrepit in

the rear). The soft translucency of my sculpture’s stone – spectral, cloudlike, delicate –

renders Sick Child ethereally, dreamily radiant.

My sculpture has been carved from a texturally-effusive piece of “Wounded” Mexican onyx

which was cut from a large boulder I selected on an expedition to remote El Marmól in the Baja

California (Mexico) desert. My sculptures in stone have an inherent material relation to

landscape. I always identify the places from which the stone has been sourced – marble from

Macedonia, Italy, Portugal; onyx from Mexico, Pakistan, Iran; etc.

I have spent a lot of time in the last few decades exploring quarries and stone yards in the U.S.

and Europe. I often buy beautiful stone when I come across it, even when I have no

immediate plans to use it. As a result I’ve amassed quite a large rock collection – hundreds of

tons worth. I like to stroll among my stones, with sculpture drawings and maquettes in hand,

trying to find just the right — or sometimes, obstreperously, the “wrong” — mix of form and

material. After forty-five years in very-urban New York City, I savor my every opportunity to

explore my rock pile – a sculpturally-inspirational way for me to connect with nature!

Most sculpture stone is quarried and sold in rectangular blocks. Mexican onyx, one of my

favorite materials, by contrast comes in rough chunks – veined, pitted, fissured, oddly shaped

boulders with crusty oxidized rinds. Inspired by those formations, I came up with the perverse

idea of carving rocks from rocks. I intended for my sculptures to be like “natural” inverse

readymades, petrified commentaries on both the tradition of Chinese scholars’ rocks and

natural selection, as well as the parallel Duchampian gestures: re-contextualization and

industrial selection. I want my works, although intensely artificial and hand carved, to celebrate

the natural world.

For centuries, stone was the primary medium of sculpture, but in recent times it has become –

with a few, mostly ironic exceptions – an almost déclassé material. Weighty, airy, solid,

penetrated – I hope my petro-monuments make a sensual case for stone’s reconsideration as

a medium for creating advanced contemporary art. Sick Child is a pointed example of the

balance I am trying to achieve in my work between what I intend and what I accept.