Filippo Sciascia, Xuanlong, 2020

Informing much of Sciascia’s work is an interest in the hoary origins of civilization’s contemporary technological and cultural systems. Here, anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s paradigm of the social lives of things, or the “thing-in-motion”, provides an apropos theoretical framework: “For that we have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, their trajectories. It is only through the analysis of these trajectories that we can interpret the human transactions and calculations that enliven things. Thus, even though from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodological point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context.” The cultural biography of the object, then, reveals a broad economy of utility that may encompass varied forms of use. The artist’s Xuanlong series is premised on objects and matter in motion, things that acquire new significance in purposive juxtapositions with other things; his works inflect the socio-cultural biographies of these objects, reconfiguring their semantic registers as much as their material ones.

The first Xuanlong piece is a wall-bound sculpture that assumes the form of a dragon’s head with a gaping maw, fabricated from a mixture of volcanic black sand and resin. The piece was cast using a readymade silicone mold that Sciascia acquired from a local workshop in Bali, where he is based; the casting process was accomplished without the use of the support shell that is usually required for even medium-sized objects, and resulted in the deliberate deformation of the sculpture’s original shape. Here, the dovetailing of form and medium may be located in the myth of Naga Besukih, the dragon of Balinese lore that is said to reside in the crater of the island’s volcano, Mount Agung, that remains active today. The etiological linking of volcanic activity and mythical beast finds, in Sciascia’s hands, a correspondence in the recreation of draconian iconography from volcanic black sand, an imbrication of cause and effect. The brilliant corn-yellow of the wall on which the work hangs also proffers historical reference: it immediately recalls the regal hue of Chinese imperial culture, but also the use of gold in Byzantine art - as well as, according to the artist, Vincent van Gogh’s famous sunflowers.

TABLET: New Paintings by Filippo Sciascia

TABLET: New Paintings by Filippo Sciascia

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Filippo Sciascia