Filippo Sciascia, Lumina Mense, 2013

ART SG | 12 - 15 Jan 2023: From the Land of Gold Below the Winds in the South Seas

Marina Bay Sands Singapore, 12 - 15 Gennaio 2023

These works are representative of Bali-based Filippo Sciascia’s abiding fascination with the materiality, the production and the metaphorical language of light. The Primitive Mornings series returns to the originary moments of human evolution and civilization, its ‘primitive mornings’. (All works in the series are similarly titled.) Light is utilized here as an analogy for knowledge, and an index of energy – two engines driving mankind’s development. The work is also indicative of the artist’s interest in semiology. The lighted branch in the painting, which replaces the representation of light with the actual phenomenon, recalls the shape of arrows, one of the most common motifs in European heraldry. The Lumina Mense sculptures likewise bear out the association of light as a civilizing force. “Lumina” means lights in Latin; “mense” is the Afrikaans word for people. Sciascia, himself a lifelong immigrant, is beholden to the cross-cultural exchange of knowledge across geographical borders and distances, and the use of an African language in the title refers to the notion of Africa as the origins of humanity, as well as the fact that he hails from Sicily, one of Europe’s closest points to the African continent. Here, he reproduces the crowd as a series of anonymous heads on objects that are suggestive of various cultures: a bull that recalls the creature’s centrality to Hinduism; a wooden sculpture from an indigenous community in Timor, Indonesia; an East Asian deity, one hand raised in the abhaya mudra, the gesture of fearing not.

ART SG | 12 - 15 Jan 2023: From the Land of Gold Below the Winds in the South Seas

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