Venice is a city that has been floating for centuries, suspended between water and sky, between ruin, mold, and beauty. Right there, in that trembling in-between, hangs my installation “Volo del Angelo.”
The work was created in 2012 for the exhibition Dreaming of Lucidity, curated by my dear friend Charlotte Stein, founder of Infantellina Contemporary Gallery in Berlin. Charlotte is one of those rare curators who doesn’t just organize, she rocks what art actually means. She moves between Berlin and Venice like a medium between two states of matter, clear-sighted, good-humored, uncompromising wild.
Presented in the venerable Palazzo Zenobio, the work explored exactly this fragile realm between awareness and dream, between reason and the darker sides of belief, between futile hope and late realization.
My angel, a skewed, marble creature carved entirely from Carrara Statuario is another manifestation of my Pinokel figures, and at the same time a homage to Venice’s famous ritual of the Volo dell’Angelo, when each year an angel glides over Piazza San Marco to open the carnival season.
Suspended on a rotating marble column, connected by a semi-filigree system of chains, the angel hangs in fragile equilibrium. On one side: two egg-shaped marble forms, symbols of rebirth, inscribed CREDENZA (Faith) and SPERANZA (Hope).
On the other: the angel herself, who carries, in a small act of self-inflicted devotion, a sadomasochistic counterweight hanging painfully from her breasts, engraved with the words ARTE E SCIENZA.
This symbolic distribution of weight is no accident. It expresses the tension that has driven me for years, the fragile balance between science and art, between rational knowledge and the human need for meaning. My angel doesn’t float in freedom; she’s caught in a system of counterweights, a balance that exists only because it’s constantly under threat.
Faith and hope, unfortunately, are always heavier than art and science, which means they’re forever pulling the latter down.
Her body is sensual, not childlike, and wounded and grotesquely sanctified. The smile frozen, the eyes hollow, the wings heavy, the hair gilded and perfect. A being that longs to fly, but is held in place by the gravity of fear.
It’s not only about religion, it’s about the tension between trust, knowledge, and action.
Also the wrong kind of action. That old question: whether a world without illusion or distraction could ever be endured.(For me personally, it couldn’t.)
Above the installation hangs the very first prototype of our F.A.C. “Cruxials” series, a small work from my time in Jerusalem: my little Jesus Christ, good-humored, yet a sacrilege. That connection mattered to me: above, the iconic symbol of redemption; below, his marble angel, struggling in vain to keep her intellectual balance.
The space itself, a dark, wood-paneled hall inside Palazzo Zenobio, amplified everything. Where silence usually ruled, during the exhibition you could hear only the faint clinking of chains.
I remember those three days in Venice: setting up the installation in the cold winter light, the long talks with Charlotte about art, responsibility, and why Venice is slowly sinking into the sea and the absolute nightmare of transporting fragile marble sculptures in those trembling water-taxis through the waves of the lagoon. And the rain. But Charlotte was calm as always, focused on what mattered.
“Art,” she told me once, “is not an altar, it’s a proposal for balance between beauty and the next crash.”
And that’s exactly what Volo del Angelo was: not a flight, but a condition.
A state of hovering, enduring suspension, without lying about it.
In the afterglow of that exhibition I realized how deeply Venice itself had inscribed its body into the work, this city that refuses to drown, even as it’s already sinking.
Volo del Angelo became a metaphor for what drives me still: my eternal balancing act between faith and doubt, between hope, science and my art.
Venice 2012
