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Tom Holland’s 1979 standing painting Votto resembles an upright, laminated torn-paper collage. At nearly nine-and-a-third feet tall by around five-and-a-half feet wide and almost three feet

deep, the artwork is made of multiple triangular sheets and varied strips of painted aluminum. The layered pieces are held together with nails and rivets, folded, bent, and curved into a form like an unfurling scroll. The bulk of the artwork is painted thickly with a deep rusty red and with lighter accents of neon and pastel rectangles, triangles, and ovals. Dark paint drips and dots scattered about give the smooth metal even more dynamic texture. The accents are mainly painted onto the smaller pieces of metal, while the narrow drips are found all over. Like a painting hung on a wall, this artwork has a defined front and a back, rather than being something a viewer would walk all the way around, as with a sculpture. First the shapes, and then more about the colors. 

The main portion of Votto consists of large triangles held together to form larger sheets, and it balances on the bases of two staggered triangle sheets. A triangle that spans half the width of the sculpture juts up above an otherwise straight top border on the right. That triangle has a slim tail wrapping around the artwork’s curved right side. The end of the tail is buried beneath a set of four smaller strips near the top border. These strips resemble fabric ribbons laid onto the larger pieces, each one folded a few times to zig zag a bit over itself. The free-standing painting’s perfectly straight left edge is made with a right triangle pointing downward. Halfway down, its tip is bent and folded backward at 90 degrees to hover parallel to the ground instead of helping to keep the artwork anchored. 

The rusty red base color across the whole form is applied unevenly in thick, dripping strokes so that it varies in darkness, though the paint is never light enough for the silvery color of the sheet metal to show through. Accent shapes in neon yellow, baby blue, jade green, burgundy, and emerald green are often painted on the metal in layers themselves. The colors are sometimes applied thinly enough for multiple colors to show through in places, resembling tissue paper placed over thicker, darker construction paper. Over much of the artwork, thin blue and red paint drips trail down. They are often sparse, though near the top set of folded ribbon-like pieces, the drips are more plentiful. If this were a paper collage, the drips might resemble little rivulets of water carrying away the color from streamers thrown at a parade on a rainy day. But being made of aluminum, and standing firmly on the ground, nothing about this towering work feels like it could be so fleeting.