The idea for the exhibition arose from the proposal and the discussion which followed with Osservatorio Futura, an independent space located in the San Donato district of Turin. Starting with the assumption that the space has no commercial purposes, the idea of creating a site-specific work was born, with the possibility to use mediums and techniques I do not usually adopt in painting. The proposed name of the work is Ghost dance, and it is composed of eight sculptures designed specifically for the exhibition space, born with the purpose of creating a unique image. The work represents a group of ghostly figures in a dance or action of some kind around a boy who is lying on the ground. The meaning of the image is unclear and open to interpretation. It could possibly represent a group of ghosts in ritual prayer over a dead boy, as well as depict a series of presences disturbing a boy in his sleep. I preferred to leave the ultimate meaning of the work undefined. As the exhibition space consists of a single room, I was interested in suggesting an image with a scenic and enveloping feeln fact, I ideally used as a reference some 15th-century sculptural groups of the Emilian school, first and foremost Niccolò dell’Arca’s “Lamentation over the Dead Christ” in the church of Santa Maria della Vita in Bologna.
When I create an image I am always interested in reasoning in retrospect as to why I chose a particular subject and why I found it particularly evocative. In general, the theme of death interests me a great deal, especially in its relationship to the visual arts and to images in general. The theme of death is intrinsic to the language of photography: any image is the presence of an absence, and this finds its greatest expression in images of deceased persons, which are representations of figures permanently absent in the space and time in which they are made. As early as ancient Egypt, the deceased ideally exchanged their physical, earthly body for the imperishable body of the portrait or funerary mask, a process constantly perpetuated by the relationship between the visual arts and funeral rites. Thus, the image becomes both representation and ghost of the represented object, and in this sense, the boy’s sculpture simultaneously signals his presence and absence, welcomed with a dance from the world of Elsewhere.
Leonardo Devito
Erik Saglia takes on these considerations for his second solo show to propose an installation, made with his renowned technique. As the result, the entire installation is a Cosmogony of signs and intersecting lines, of vectorial axes, of organized schemes of an unorganized reality, where the intersection of the abscissa and the ordinate organizes the vision of both the Artist and the Man. The visitor is compelled to contemplate it exactly as it happens while observing the cosmos through a telescope. Saglia’s Art is a full-size Portable Cosmogony because it can be carried “within us”.
