Saturno 2011

Lino Tagliapietra made this vortex of glass, *Saturno*, imagining the edges of the solar system as shifting bands of pure colour, like strokes of paint made molten. You can almost feel the artist spinning and shaping the glass. Look how the light dances through the ripples and waves – like oil on water, it bends and refracts, creating a dazzling effect. I can imagine Tagliapietra, his face flushed with heat, coaxing this unruly material into something so elegant and refined. It’s wild how something so solid can appear so fluid, almost as if the glass is still in motion. I'm thinking of Kandinsky's colour studies where colour is freed from form to express pure sensation, and the Colour Field painters like Rothko. There’s an experimental drive, this constant probing of the medium to see what it can do. Like Tagliapietra, they invite us to dive in and lose ourselves in the possibilities of colour.