«What counts for me in art is to abolish the learned reference to matter.
The sculptor aiming at a synthesis of the impressions he has received should be able to transmit all the sensations that his heart has registered so, that looking at his work, the beholder could experience fully the emotions felt by him in front of nature.
In fact the most important thing is that looking at what the artist has translated in a subject matter, the beholder can imagine what is not represented. Nature has no limits therefore a work of art shouldn’t impose any.
In that way, an artist would render the atmosphere that is around the figure, the color that gives it life and the prospective that substitutes life. The impression that you would produce in me is different whether I would encounter you in a garden, or whether I saw you among a group of men, be it in a salon or in the street. That is what matters and nothing else.
Then you have to ask yourself whether the impression that I want to communicate to the spectator will change depending whether the beholder is near the figure or far away from it, whether he looks at it from below or from above .
The first impression one grasps is very different if one looks at something for the first time or if his eyes - tired of the scrutiny- take a rest.
If from the first instant the tone that seems to be in the middle ground moves to the foreground and then again back, then the beholder will sense distinctly the pulsation of life.
While his eyes are taking rest, the beholder can perceive the sensations that have moved the artist, those that have dictated to the sculptor ‘s hands the form that is now in front of him.
And in this way, he can experience an intuition of prospective totally distinct from what he would have experienced had the artist applied the prospective rules taught in art schools.
This is why I do not believe that it is possible to perceive a horse with all four legs in the same glance nor a man isolated in space like a doll.
I feel that in both cases, this horse, this man belongs to a continuum from which they cannot be separated: that they are part of a circumambient atmosphere which the artist has to take into account… You don’t go around a statue or a painting because you cannot go around a form to conceive its perception.
Nothing is material in space.
Understood in that fashion, art cannot be divided: sculpture doesn’t exist as one medium and painting as another. »

Medardo Rosso, Paris 1902

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