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Anish Kapoor is widely accepted as one of the most influential and recognizable sculptors of today. His works not only succeed in installing a kind of democratic engagement in their public manifestations but they also question some of the fundamental notions that man ponders.

“Descension", exhibited in 2015 in Anish Kapoor’s solo show at Galleria Continua / San Gimignano, is a continuation of the work “Descent into limbo”, a cube building with a dark hole in the floor, first exhibited at Documenta IX in Kassel. “Descent into limbo” drags the viewer down into it, curious to discover the depth of the void before him yet fearful of what it may hold. “Descension” destabilizes, it undermines our perception of the earth as a solid element, and confirms Kapoor’s interest in non-objects and self-generated forms. A perpetual force, a thrust downwards, towards a totally unknowable interior. 

The work is a result of Anish Kapoor’s long-term preoccupation with void spaces and the notion that there is more space than what can be seen. It provides scope for mythological recall, bringing into discussion cultural and societal figures like Plato, who presented the study of the cave, the shadows on the wall of the cave the only reality for its inhabitants, the Freudian opposite image, the transformation of an idea into its opposite, and Dante’s adventure into the void, or hell, which paradoxically is full, of fear and darkness. 

Dealing with this void, Kapoor created a negative form that although by definition, lacking, creates something which is separate from its physical existence as an object. An ever-changing process, an autonomous whirling water body which continually falls into itself manages to make people gather around it, hypnotized by its movement and by a shared moment with others even with no seemingly visible or audible communication. There is a sense that the viewer is taking part in something. This dichotomy of creation yet emptyness upholds Kapoor’s belief that a void object is not an empty object. It holds endless potential for generative possibility. 

“Descension” evokes an enigmatic “dark material”, something that we all primitively recognize, and causes a shared voyage to what is beyond the sensible, beyond the believable, beyond the workable and representable. A feeling of curiosity yet fear is tangible in the experience of the work and echoes the unintuitive, that is the descent, downwards and inwards, to the back of the cave, to what is unseen. The place that Kapoor sees as the “place of the object after psychoanalysis”, an object that is in between being and non-being, an object that depicts the inevitable – that most of the matter in the universe is dark and that it is an autonomous force of nature, a geometric object made of water.

Lorenzo Fiaschi, co-founder of Galleria Continua, talks about working with Anish Kapoor.