Orphic
Orphic unfolds as a field of nine images, brought together within a strict square composition. Inside that frame appear scenes that mark our time: people in constant transit, war, a cemetery, polluted air, crumbling ice caps, the emptiness of public space during the Covid period, and a rubbish dump. Each image stands on its own, yet none remains innocent in isolation. Together they form a constellation of unrest, loss and human urgency, as if the world were not being narrated here, but revealed in fragments.
At the centre stands my own sculptural form, modelled with the intention of making a mould from it. Yet in that very process of fixing and preserving, the figure was partly damaged again. At the back, especially around the head, the wires and small blocks that once held the clay together became visible once more. What should have remained hidden returns to the surface. What once served as support now appears as a scar. This gives the figure a particular presence: not as a finished object, but as something that carries its own vulnerability within itself.
This is where, for me, the core of the work resides. Human beings strive for form, order, progress and control, yet in that same gesture they leave traces of fracture everywhere. The world around us bears the marks of this: in war and waste, in ecological decline, in emptiness, and in a way of living that seems always to be moving without ever truly arriving. The central figure offers no answer to that condition, but rather an echo of it. The body, or more precisely the head, appears here as the bearer of a civilisation that builds and unsettles at the same time.
Orphic thus becomes a reflection on the human condition. On what becomes visible when the surface of things is torn open. On the fragile boundary between making and damaging, between preserving and losing, between presence and decay. The work does not seek to explain. Instead, it holds the gaze on what we usually try to cover over: the traces of our actions, the remains of our time, and the question of what, in the end, humanity leaves behind of itself.
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