I created Black Virgin in 2012 and presented it in Carrara during the exhibition Pimp My Mary II. It was an evening when the city itself became a stage. In the former convent in Carrara’s old town, people painted, music played, voices mingled, and laughter echoed. My work stood there like a silent magnet, yet it never remained still: everyone wanted to touch the black crank. Everyone wanted to see the Madonna slowly sink into the oil and rise again, as if to be reborn.
The crane is shaped like a gallows, an apparatus for execution. The Madonna is suspended from it as if awaiting her sentence, not exalted, but condemned. In this gesture, the sacred figure becomes both victim and witness, hanging between worship and annihilation.
The oil filling the barrel was our used oil, a waste product, a poison, yet also a strangely enchanting, dark and shimmering liquid. For me the negation of the white marble that defines Carrara. Carrara, the city of light, of immaculate stone, of purity and sublimity, so goes the myth. The reality is different. Beside the marble stands the oil: dark, viscous, toxic, heavy. And therein lies, for me, the truth of our age: today’s “gold” is no longer buried in stone (the white gold of Carrara), but in the tanks of our engines.
The title is both literal and double-edged: Black Virgin as an invocation of the Black Madonna, long known as the patron saint of miners, but also as a commentary on the deification of oil. The gesture shifts the sacred into the industrial: spirituality is dragged through dirty motor oil, cult image meets raw material. This contamination fascinates me, not as scandal for its own sake, but as an honest choreography of our present. Oil kills, but it also saves countless lives.
With Black Virgin, I wanted to make this inversion visible. While Michelangelo sought the white block, I seek the black mirror. Marble built cathedrals and immortalized the Madonna, but oil has accelerated us, globalized us, consumed us, and ultimately catapulted us into infinite space. It is the true sacrament of modernity: contested, worshipped, poisonous, salvific.
The Madonna figure is no accident. She embodies protection and hope. In Black Virgin, she is immersed in the new “holy liquid” The oil. For me, it was a kind of baptism, but a dark one: a ritual that soaks old spirituality in the black matter of modernity. The white Madonna becomes a black icon, heavy and gleaming, contradictory, contaminated.
Many found it scandalous. Bishops complained, believers felt provoked, the media grumbled. Yet I believe the work succeeded precisely for this reason. It was a mirror, not only of oil, but of social truth. What we worship, what we need, what drives us, is no longer the divine above, but the black substance from below.
The „crank“, which I deliberately placed at a low height, turned the spectators into participants. Each person who turned it assumed responsibility. Each lowered the Madonna deeper into the oil or drew her out again. It became a collective ritual, a game of guilt and curiosity, reverence and cynicism.
Looking back, Black Virgin remains one of my works in which Carrara is most deeply inscribed: the city of white mountains, where a black barrel stands, heavy and gleaming. Two poles, marble and oil @ meeting in my work.
Carrara 2012
