Charles Arnoldi

Constantly challenging himself as an artist, Charles Arnoldi chose a completely new means of expression in the late 1990s — potatoes. As Gregory Amenoff pointed out, Arnoldi once again abandons “the refinement that he’s worked up to with a certain body of work and [goes] back to a raw and primitive beginning. It’s that pulling back away from an elegance, only to build it all up again. I see that all the way through his career.”

Arnoldi began the potato series by casting small potatoes into bronze and welding them together to make whimsical wall and tabletop sculptures. He then sculpted large-scale potatoes which, once cast in bronze, were joined in gravity-defying combinations.

As Arnoldi was inspired by twigs in his earliest work, he was now inspired by the formal elements of potatoes, handpicking them for their particular size, shape and texture. The playful sculptures are beautifully engineered highlighting the juxtaposition between the seemingly light and weightless quality of the composition with the dark heavy color of the patina. Furthermore, the surprisingly large scale of the potatoes creates a delightfully humorous and striking end result. At this time, the abstracted potato shapes also found their way into his paintings, which were developed out of drawings based on the original sculptures. As if to emphasize the strictly formal aspect of these works, Arnoldi chose to limit them to black, white and gray.