IMG 7018-001-London to Paris

Cass Sculpture Foundation, Goodwood, West Sussex.

Commissioned by CASS in 2000, London to Paris is one of the last large-scale sculptures Eduardo Paolozzi made before his death. The piece depicts a flat wagon – a device used to transport goods by rail – loaded with the dismembered hands, feet and head of a mechanistic figure, as well as a number of abstract and industrially shaped objects. The piece was inspired by Paolozzi’s childhood memories of the long train journey he took each year from Scotland to Milan, changing in London and Paris. The varied components and materials that combine to form the sculpture typify Paolozzi’s masterful ability to create personal and sometimes brutal portraits, through a study of the everyday. Fascinated by the relationship between man and the mechanized world of the twentieth century, Paolozzi made frequent studies of engines and modes of transport experienced in his past, which Paolozzi described as a sequence of objects. In London to Paris elements of that sequence are organised into a sculptural collage, a process Paolozzi likened to cutting sentences out of a book and rearranging the components in order to create something beyond one’s deliberate conception. Here, he unites the disparate sequence of man and man-made components in order to create a surreal and dream-like encapsulation of a memory. The scientific and technological developments of the post–war era are another recurring subject in Paolozzi’s work.