Saluti & Baci - Graphic Days
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IDOLI®
Painted wood (offcuts from the cladding of a church), cardboard box, coloured straw
Unique pieces, signed, dated and numbered
2022
ContextIDOLI® (Idols) is a series of small wooden sculptures. Each IDOLO is unique, signed, dated and given its own identification number. Whoever buys one undertakes to look after it, protecting it from extreme cold and scorching heat.
The IDOLI® are consumerism and idolatry. The myths we keep helping to create are nothing but idols of painted wood.
In contrast with the trend of the 1990s, recent years have seen a reversal: putting on weight, having more flesh on the bones, in order to be more desirable. Subcutaneous implants, high-calorie and high-protein diets, poses designed to enhance curves, clothes a size too small. Everything serves to display an abundance of flesh and bodies: a butcher's counter, a battery of chickens in the sun.
If it is true that an abundant figure is inversely proportional to economic prosperity, how should we judge the health of our society?The auraThese idols arrive in a small cardboard box filled with coloured straw, for a touch of glamour, because every self-respecting idol needs an aura. The IDOLI logo is inspired by the great luxury brands, but the price is a sale price, a mass-market price. We swing between these two poles: luxury, and the search for it in other, more affordable idols.The body
The human body is compressed into the rigid shape of the wood. All that remains are the sexual characteristics, the centre of pornographic eros. Is the worship of idols the new pornography?
The wood comes from the offcuts of the cladding of a newly built church: the church as a place where other idols are worshipped. The sculptures are made of what it threw away, of those who did not make it into the system and were left outside.
Every IDOLO has a different price, to underline how arbitrary the value we give to idols is. Who decides what an IDOLO is worth? Whoever sets the price, or whoever agrees to pay it?
The price of each idol depends on its weight in grams, as at a meat market.