Life of S
Resin, fiber glass, original photography of S
2019
202 x 34 x 37 cm
080 x 13 x 15 po (base included)
One of a kind
Photography Lino Cipresso
“For children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles.” – Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
Life of S is the representation of our innocence and essence received at birth, distorted and corrupted by the forces of the human condition.
A woman standing, in contrapposto, hides her breast. She shows us, posed above her bosom, a picture of her, little girl, wearing a smile carrying a thousand great hopes of life to come.
Her flesh is furrowed with many cracks and crevices and suggests a rough life made of hazards, sufferings and disappointments. Feeling amplified by the contrast offered by the soft curves of her body.
The letters L O V E tattooed on the phalanges of the right hand and H A T E on those of the left hand let us glimpse its revolt and the depth of its inner drama.
The hanging strap on her right arm suggests an almost embarrassing sensuality to the cracked body and indicates a vulnerability that opposes the unsocial nature of her skinhead hairstyle.
A lock of hair hangs on her right as on her picture of a child. This lock is the evocation of her former innocence which is still part of her.
Her tired face bears the pain of lost illusions, the look is both melancholy and lucid.
To each of us to tell the story of this undisclosed drama
Life of S and The Birth of Venus
Life Of S is also a reinterpreted version of Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, which she takes up on the opposite.
While Botticelli presents the goddess Venus, symbol of Beauty and Love, to the idealized body, Life of S shows us a woman in her “ordinary” humanity where the ideal of Beauty is absent and the Love inseparable from Hatred. She reminds us by her tattoos how much the human experience is between these two poles.
While Venus seems to come out of a dream, eyes half closed, the oblique gaze, S poses on us a direct and frank look and speaks to us directly. Like a brutal mirror showing our human condition and revealing what has become of our candor; our first innocence.
In this, each of us carries with it a share of Life of S. This part is our share of humanity … it is universal; Life of S bears witness to this universality.
The starting point
In December 2018 I saw in a public place a woman who seemed to carry her life as a burden, in a way that had seized me. I wondered then that she had been his life? What had happened to her? What had she dreamed for herself when she was a child?
It was at this moment that the idea and the image of a sculpture to be made came to me.
In the facts S it is the initial of the name of the model which posed for this sculpture and whose life approaches the work. The picture of the child is an original photograph of her then 8 years old.