Next to the tracks south of downtown Fort Lauderdale sits one of sculptor Peter Giovenco’s major acquisitions: A deactivated naval mine, seven feet or so in diameter, weighing maybe a ton and looking like a fallen brass moon.

One evening last November at the opening of his Full Circle Gallery, Giovenco told me how the old mine became the gallery’s signpost: He had spotted it for sale in a classified ad and hauled it here, from the Gulf Coast, using a friend’s truck.

Somewhere along Alligator Alley, he said, the thing nearly rolled off the flatbed. Disaster, or comedy, was averted by a quick stop to re-secure the moorings.

The “how” was the point of this transport tale. The “why” didn’t come up because it was understood: Giovenco, 37, who died of complications from a brain tumor on Aug. 4 at his home in Fort Lauderdale, simply needed for that object to be at his gallery, close to his own curious metal sculptures.

As a self-employed artist, Giovenco had learned the right practical skills — how to find, exhibit, buy and sell. But his great gift was for creating, which he did with imagination and quiet persistence even as he fought to be healthy over the last three-plus years of his life.

Giovenco used the rough trade of metallurgy – heating, hammering, cutting, stamping – to build harmonious objects. He made abstracts, like the levered, leaning chrome spindle I took to be some kind of frozen gravity clock. He made realistic pieces, like the mammoth sailfish mounted over a road through the Florida Keys.

He molded slabs and welded from scrap; found objects and remnants of industry were a big part of his vision and his compositions. Whatever the source material, the finished pieces could be delicate or imposing, animal or mechanical. The line between biology and industry blurs in the presence of his work.

The art grew out of an interest that got hold of Giovenco early, when he was growing up in New Jersey. A biography at petergiovenco.com describes a child “fascinated with industrial machinery and the way mechanical devices worked.”

“In high school,” the biography continues, “Giovenco was one of the few students that took metal shop to actually learn something.”

He moved to Florida to attend college and once here picked up foundry and fabrication jobs. He gravitated from industry to art and later combined the disciplines, applying his artistry to commissions such as office desks, bar tops, doorways and window grates. The functional pieces, like his sculptures, are a tango of points, lines, mass and movement.

(At the opening of Circle Gallery, a friend of mine coveted one object above all: a curved metal toilet paper roll that Giovenco had made and installed in the gallery bathroom.)

Giovenco also did restorations of other artists’ metal sculptures, a skill that likewise drew on his dual talent as artist and artisan — and required, obviously, a level of trust from clients that he wouldn’t damage their masterpieces.

I can only imagine the cacophony of loud noise and piercing light in Giovenco’s work space, when he would be going at something with an arc welder and mallets. His chosen medium was not for the faint of heart, or the jumpy. I sometimes imagined it as a combat of man versus metal.

Except that Giovenco’s work doesn’t communicate severe struggle. The metal in his art looks cooperative, as if it had come around with coaxing to its agreeable shape.

It’s not hard to imagine Giovenco having that kind of patience. I didn’t know him well, but the person I did know was quiet, gently watchful and not long to warm up to a story like the almost-runaway sea mine.

We were standing that evening in a driveway painted by citronella lamps and light from the gallery windows. People inside circled metal sculptures and studied canvasas by other artists. Outside, a guitarist was playing and a bartender handed beers across a table made of wood sheets from the studio’s garage.

It was the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and Giovenco had created all of this out of his ability. He could see into metal, and through it.