Jupiter Contemporary is thrilled to present a historical work by Izhar Patkin at this year's Untitled Art Miami Beach 2024.
Patkin’s 1990 epic sculpture Palagonia is his version of the 19th century tradition of the Grand Tour to Italy's deep artistic history. It fluxes Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s 1652 Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, the altarpiece marble depiction of Saint Teresa’s orgasmic transverberation at the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, with the 1749 frolicking grotesques by Francesco Ferdinando II Gravina at the Villa Palagonia in Sicily, a sight Goethe described as filled with “elements of madness” and as a monstrous expression of the unconscious. The overall materiality of Palagonia invokes the ‘veil-like’ and groundbreaking impressionist wax sculptures of Medardo Rosso of the 1890s.
Expanding on Bernini’s saintly masturbation scene, Patkin’s Teresa is either having an orgasm, or a night-mare (portrayed by the leaping horse). Bernini’s angel, about to penetrate the saint’s heart with his dart, is swapped with a putto aiming a violin’s bow (the violin itself is carried by his pooch). In Patkin’s Palagonia, rather than seeing visions, Saint Teresa is hearing sounds and voices (a saint’s halo becomes a golden tambourine). Surrounding playful figures are depicted as extensions of musical instruments they contain (a coiled snake metamorphoses into a trumpet; a giant’s larynx mimics his accordion next to an imp blowing a flute).
The three human figures in Palagonia are actual live-casts of Patkin’s friends: the artist Josef Ramaseder, the photographer, musician and club-kid David Yarritu, and childhood pal Noa Ben Ari.
In an essay titled "The Credo of My Ghosting Process" (p. M Galleria d’arte, Florence, 1989), the legendary critic, Edit deAk, quoted a conversation about his process:
"The wax phase of sculpting is where the creative process nestles... It is the stage of the not yet presentable. It is the private, the intimate and the vulnerable phase (also that which gets thrown away). It is the soul of sculpting, not the commodity of it... You are literally formulating the shape, developing the [wax] albino image from the dark into the light, regurgitating these figments of your image-ination."
Palagonia seems malleable, alive, and ever on the cusp of transformation. The process of its making remains raw, and embodies “the intimate and the vulnerable phase.” The effect is of figures encased in a paradoxical space where they are simultaneously fully formed, yet suspended in their moment of becoming.
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Tuesday, December 3: 10 am - 7 pm (VIP & Press Preview)
Wednesday, December 4 - Saturday, December 7: 11 am - 7 pm
Sunday, December 8: 11 am - 5 pm