Autoritratto vasocefalo

This work consists of a body of clay tilted on itself. The head is a vessel flute, once the spectator has conveyed a breath in it, it produces a sounding whistle. The male figure represents the artist's self-portrait, which has been shaped with his own bodily appearance, inspired by Hippolyte Flandrin's "Jeune Homme nu assis au bord de la mer" (1835). In the field of sculpture, however, the artist was inspired by a marble sculpture attributed to Michelangelo Buonarroti and considered by some scholars a self-portrait: the Crouching Boy, dated to 1500 (Frey) and now conserved at the St. Petersburg Museum. Theme and position are also a reworking of Rodin's "Thinker" (1902) and of the Hellenistic Bronze Statue of the "Spinarium". However, despite the influence of various works of art and the confluence of different iconographies, the curled up position and the arms around the knees, with their arched back, are completely original, and are meant to suggest the breathing movement of the model. The artist identified himself as a vessel-flute figure and, in order to better understand the sculpture, has experienced all its aspects, embodying himself in it. Self-representation (Selbstdarstellung) as a vessel-flute is in turn emphasized by the melancholic pose of the head resting on his hand, according to a typical iconography of figures absorbed in intellectual meditation. It is therefore possible to think that the statue depicts the intellectual act of creation, which also refers to the well-known adagio by Pico della Mirandola, who argues that each of us must be "plastès" and "fictor" (plaster and sculptor) of his soul. The universal theme of self-consciousness is here reinvented and tied to the act of sculpting. This work comes to life thanks to its characteristics of automa, understood as an anthropomorphic shape, which is able to interact with the public. Spectators are invited to fill the head flute with their own breath, bringing it back to life and producing the ancestral sound of the wind instruments. Symbolically, the absence of somatic traits in the face can be interpretable as a traumatic one, it is known that children who have suffered a trauma have difficulty in recognizing themselves in a mirror. This traumatic effect is also part of the body structure, which, before being fired, was broken when still in the state of raw earth, and was suddendly re-assembled. This recreational gesture reflects the artist's condition, forced to cope with his trauma, surviving to the continuous self-reproduction of himself. There is a trace of such a conflict in the coalescence and the suture scars of the various fragments that compose it.