Painted soldered brass, 7 x 7 x 4, 2021.
Hesiod has Prometheus carry fire down from Olympus in a hollow fennel stalk, and the stalk is the first thing the sculpture offers: a bark-textured branch, cut at the end, rising from a flared cup. Plato adds that Prometheus took more than fire. He took it together with the arts of Hephaestus and Athena, and so what he gave humankind was the power to make things. A brass sculpture joined with a torch is a direct heir to that gift, and the red reads as fire’s own colour, laid over a work that fire made. It is worn through at the edges and high points, and the brass shows underneath.
The single colour also follows the practice of Caro’s painted steels of the early 1960s, like Early One Morning, in which one colour binds unlike parts into one configuration. Here the parts are a stepped plate, a fan of radiating rods, a cast scroll, a cup, a stalk, a ball, and a tapering block, and the red makes them a single body. The fan reads as flame or sunburst. The drooping peak at the top reads as a Phrygian cap, the red cap of liberty, which suits a figure whom the Romantics made the patron of rebellion.
