SOLeri FLARES

Paolo Soleri donated the concept for this sculpture to the City of Vietri sul Mare. The towering presence of a solar flare and its nuclear power is crystallised into a concrete form that rises at the town’s gateway. This modern obelisk is made of white-tinted concrete with stainless steel reinforcement bars. The sculpture’s distinctive plastic form was achieved by casting concrete into a CNC-milled polystyrene mould, carefully produced through the 3D scanning of a small-scale model created by the artist himself. This model was digitised and translated into detailed construction drawings, enabling its precise realisation.

The sculpture also functions as a bell tower, from which a series of solid bronze bells are suspended. The bells were produced at the Arcosanti foundry in the USA, the experimental city-laboratory founded by Paolo Soleri in the Arizona desert in the 1960s. After touring Italy as part of the itinerant exhibition “Planning the Ecological City: The Urban Laboratory of Paolo Soleri”, held in Rome (2005) and Naples (2007), the bells finally reached their permanent location in Vietri sul Mare.

The artwork, Brillamenti SOLeri, a play on words combining SOL (sun) and eri (“you were”), was completed posthumously in 2015, returning full circle to Vietri sul Mare, where Soleri’s Italian experience began in 1950 with the construction of the Solimene ceramic factory.

“The commission for an object to be installed on a public space prompted the SOLeri Flare that could be the first of a series. SOL means the sun, ERI means you were, we all were the sun, so my family name Soleri just states what we all were. The sun, the molten big rock we orbit around, has raging phenomena going on inside and outside. The sun flares, in all their tormented arching, are among those. Proportionally, if among the flares, the earth is the size of the pea or less. SOLeri Flares, slightly more modest, can occasionally be steel or concrete sundials, one or more stories high.”

Paolo Soleri, What if? Quaderno 1: Introduction, Cosanti Press, 2002

LOCATION
Vietri sul Mare, Italy

TEAM
Diego Guarino, Giancarlo Solimene