cages
Installation, Political / Social, Other metal, 350x200x370cm
2010/ CAGES
CAGES explicitly alludes to strictly personal inner anguishes, aptly embodied by a claustrophobic jail. Both the body and the social setting fade away or, more properly, take a new shape, of unusual symbolic strength. Behind the bars, a painful rite of self-annihilation and self-acknowledgement takes place: unfree as it is, the Ego accepts to identify with the cage, as a cage is after all needed to escape, to grasp the notion, and to seize the opportunity, of an escape. A real opportunity, though? Or just the illusion of? Indeed, the cages shine: their bars, their mirrors, their dazzling light bulbs are designed to emphasize a frightening glamour, both attractive and repulsive; and the whole scenery amounts to an architectonic trompe-l’œil, whereby spaces are endlessly multiplied and multipliable by the desire for freedom, while staying inexorably poky when one effectively tries to trespass them. After all – the artist suggests – way outs are not readily available, they are perhaps just virtual exits; and the real ones are possibly not even looked for, since the individual might be convinced (and happy) that freedom is nothing more than a sensation, a state of mind.
CAGES explicitly alludes to strictly personal inner anguishes, aptly embodied by a claustrophobic jail. Both the body and the social setting fade away or, more properly, take a new shape, of unusual symbolic strength. Behind the bars, a painful rite of self-annihilation and self-acknowledgement takes place: unfree as it is, the Ego accepts to identify with the cage, as a cage is after all needed to escape, to grasp the notion, and to seize the opportunity, of an escape. A real opportunity, though? Or just the illusion of? Indeed, the cages shine: their bars, their mirrors, their dazzling light bulbs are designed to emphasize a frightening glamour, both attractive and repulsive; and the whole scenery amounts to an architectonic trompe-l’œil, whereby spaces are endlessly multiplied and multipliable by the desire for freedom, while staying inexorably poky when one effectively tries to trespass them. After all – the artist suggests – way outs are not readily available, they are perhaps just virtual exits; and the real ones are possibly not even looked for, since the individual might be convinced (and happy) that freedom is nothing more than a sensation, a state of mind.
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