The most formative experience in the life of the Italian artist Giovanni Anselmo, who has died aged 89, came during a dawn visit to Stromboli, one of the Aeolian Islands off the coast of Sicily, in August 1965. Standing near the summit of the volcano, above the rising sun, he saw that he had no shadow. He realised then that it had been cast not on to the ground but invisibly into the ash-laden air. “My own person,” he later said, “via the invisible shadow, came into contact with the light, the infinite.”
This extraordinary expression of an ordinary event led to the work Shadow Towards the Infinity of the Peak of Stromboli During Dawn, August 6, 1965, whereby Anselmo drew geometric lines emerging from his image into the whiteness of a blank sheet of paper, and determined his subsequent sculptures and installations, through which he explored the most fundamental natural phenomena: gravity, magnetism, biological growth and decay.
