"Porcelain raises questions about everyday life, about the meaning of the objects that surround us. "
(Juli About)
Symbology and inspirations behind Juli About porcelain sculptures
The meaning of the “Ex Voto”: by grace received in the “world of yesterday”, after having received a “grace”, it was customary to ask the best craftsman in the city to build an object to offer to a saint, for the grace received.
This artifact took the name of “Ex Voto” and had to possess important characteristics from an aesthetic point of view, since it represented a public or private gesture towards a Catholic Saint, who, having been prayed or evoked, had interceded with the municipality mortal, saving him from certain death.
Initially there were original paintings on tablets, where the miraculous event was told in figurative format: bright colors to depict the experience with a technique close to naive painting. Numerous wax casts with depiction of legs, arms and feet; up to the sacred hearts in silver or simply tin. These factories, located either in sanctuaries or recently in real museums, lead the observer to embark on a human journey full of piety, sorrowful and joyful, which stimulates reflection.
The “Ex Voto” for Juli, is a prayer or a wish entrusted given to an object. It’s cathartic vision of the art. It’s the idea that thoughts can be magical, and the it is necessary to invoice the body for the body to exist.
“The figure of the cerebellum that often is represented in my works is both apace of the same time a very decorative motive that connects us with the outside. Because it could just as well be plant element. This motif build with our interiority a landscape. We, ourselves are a landscape with in a landscape.”
Ecstasy and Eros
The faces of Saint Teresa and of the Blessed Ludovica are turned upwards, to that sky where Christ and God are found, and only by directing their eyes to the sky, they live a mystical experience characterized by a complete emotional transport, which brings them to feel close to the divine. This intense experience of faith is the representation of a deep devotion lived with emotional and physical transport.
Everything is involved: soul and body. This work is, recovering from the definition enunciated by George Bataille, French writer, philosopher and anthropologist, a true example of “Sacred eroticism”, where the most human sensual drive is dissolved in the experience of religious ecstasy.
Female body
Through the realization of these enormous works, Saint Phalle discovers sculpture on a monumental scale for the first time and, for the Moderna must in Stockholm, with the help of Tinguely and Per Olof Ultvedt, he creates a giant public work: Hon / Elle: a pregnant “ Nanas” six meters high and nine wide, a goddess of fecundity, lying on her back inside which visitors can access from the vagina.
In the left breast, the artist builds a small planetarium and in the right one a bar that leads to a cinema and an exhibition of fake paintings. Convincedly feminist, the artist proposes to the general public a heartfelt denunciation of the condition of woman in society, dreaming of living in a world without discrimination or borders.
Similarly to Nicki De Saint Phalle explores the symbolism of the female body and tells the woman story’s out loud the foot allows you to move forward, like the desire. Embrace the bodies, embrace the desires. Move forward.
Being a woman and having the right to live. 25 November The International Day for Elimination of Violence Against Women.
The campaign was born in Argentina in 2015 “Ni una di memos” from 4 unites feminist activists and thousands of people who want to say “enough” to feticide and various forms of male violence against women and ask. For a structural political and social change. Juli, too, joins the initiative launched by various collectives and associations, to carry out 16 days of activism on her Instagram account, until December 10, international day of human rights.
Glass and sculpture
What unfolds through the works of Silvia Levenson is a challenging narrative, where magic reveals its ambiguity and its traps. Whit grace and delicacy, in the transparencies of the glass often declined in soft colors, the artist reveals the dark side of fairy tales and the danger that often lurks, for women, right inside the reassuring family life.
Everyday object - scissors, knives, cleavers, post - can become bodies of crime in minutes. The transparent knives floating above us are an almost invisible threat, like the candy-pink hand grenades that describe the house as a battlefield also leads us to reflect.
One hundred floating sculptural elements of white porcelain when viewed against the light, the trace left by the laces on the surface of the porcelain gives a visual effect similar to the watermark in paper. Each sculpture is made through a particular process that involves the impression of lace and depicts a woman’s handkerchief with the initials, written in red, of the person to whom it is dedicated.
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