In ancient Greece, a young girl was said to draw the sketch on her house wall of her lover’s shadow as he was going to war before dawn. Afterwards, her dad made a stele out of it and put it in a temple. It is believed that Western art began from that very shadow and that way our cities were filled with magnificent statues in which citizens recognized themselves and were proudly reflected.
Now that the fine arts have been locked up in museums of cities to which men have grown more and more indifferent, one can only find one’s own shadow on the city walls, while walking very close to them; whereas most of the time such shadows remain unnoticed.
And yet De Chirico believes that a man’s shadow is more enigmatic than any religion ever existed. Jung maintains that everyone is followed by a shadow which, the more it is ignored, the thicker and darker it becomes.
The shadow is an image or rather the representation of the object casting the shadow. But it can also deputize for the same object and turn into its copy. In our mind the shadow belongs to the world of objects and psyche at the same time, and becomes the image of the soul. In its own depth, the shadow speaks about the mystery of the human race.
Jung maintains that everyone’s followed by a shadow that gets draker and thicker the more it’s ignored. Rainer Maria Rilke laments our body’s failing because of the ongoing evaporation that wears it out. Our body evaporates and thereby emanates a shadow that would then hide within the pores of the matter but can always reappear to point to the “absence”, the same way as running into the belonging of a loved one who has departed would evoke them.
For years I’ve travelled the world carrying a big piece of cloth and a flash which he puts in front of the cloth. A passer-by would accidentally activate the flash lighting the cloth and blowing their shadow on it. The shadow, detached from the body, remains for some time on the still enlighten cloth. This is what the “meeting the shadow” consists in. The shadow, which has been emancipated from the body, projects a new image of itself. It becomes a dazzled discovery of a new, other “self”. Such other “self” is the one who is dragged into the relentless rhythm of today’s life, where days pass by very quickly and what’s left is only the image of things.
My installations give new shape to the most eluding feature of mankind, that is a human shadow
caught in a one-time but unique moment of existence. Such shadow is then released slowly and thereby symbolizes the disappearance of a human body worn out by its own evaporation.
My art aims at revealing the unexpected imagine of oneself and its slowly fading away: such is the
“meeting the shadow” operation and the source of its emotional strength.
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