Italy- Filippo Zuriato

The grimace of a child is first and foremost a problem of verisimilitude: observing and “doing” (the clay evokes the ancestral act of shaping), bends the matter to a mimetic representation. So the tangle of hair, the texture of the clothes, the folds of the face, are imprinted in clay and seconded by acrylic paint that covers the surface (in other, rare cases, different materials are added to yield a particular effect). Freed from aesthetic issues, the models chosen and depicted by Zuriato belong to the present and living: a Chinese man drinking from a bottle, a man who spits an old teacher, captured and transported in a separate dimension, and the entire fragment, the human and the mutant mingle to form a collection of characters, placed in parallel of the real world which respects all the measurements and proportions. Preceded by the “Adolescente”, the subject presented here (a work created for OPEN14) gestures back in an infantile and familiar way, even if improper: the almond-eyed boy who pretends, in tautological key, to be what it is, raises a contradiction, a condition that is impossible due to lack of recognition of his origin. Showing he has acquired Western ways and habits, the small oriental boy on the pedestal suggests an actual monument to how fragile the integration is and perhaps, on the other hand, represents the loss of identity.

Text by
Elisa Prete