In April 1966, Paolo Icaro moved to New York and started developing the ‘idea of the work as a place of experience’. That is, the physical place of work becomes the place of the sculpture itself, since Icaro is prompted by large, empty spaces – spaces he wants to conquer and transform into sculpture. The place of labor and the place of the work are therefore not two separate entities, but blend into a single situation where the borders between life and work are challenged. This yields to his idea of merging the dimensions of the environment with the measurements of his own body, giving rise to a space that can be inhabited and crossed, where sculpture goes definitively beyond the object. This leads to the Foresta metallica / Metallic Forest in which the borders between sculpture, architecture and environment are blurred. Through the use of steel angle irons, hand-painted in an acidgreen color, Icaro dissects and shapes the empty space of his studio, on the sixth floor of an industrial building at 53 Greene Street in SoHo, transforming it into an abnormal, eccentric geometry, a fantastic architecture that both occupies and dematerializes space.
