America 1970

Alfredo Halegua’s sculpture 'America' is made of hulking steel sections, somewhere between ochre and umber in colour, bolted together like some brutalist monument, or a giant robot's discarded limb. It must have taken a good deal of engineering to get this thing to stand up. I imagine the artist wrestling with the metal, figuring out how to bend and shape it, a dance between intention and material resistance. The bottom section, the foot or the root, seems to curve down like a question mark, or a hesitant step. And then the blocks start stacking up, one on top of the other, until the top one seems to almost float in the air. I get the sense that Halegua was thinking about how things are built, both physically and conceptually. There is a kind of poetry in the way the simple, almost childlike geometry builds up like a totemic form. It's like he is saying something about weight and gravity, but also about the kind of hope and possibility that's inherent in building something new.