Mutual Mutism, Leather, microcrystalline wax, ø 45 cm, 2017- ongoing
We can view the representation of the belly-button across secular figurative sculpture as the ultimate victorious act of the mimesis, because it indicates a foregone origin that’s not real, and its self-referential: it’s a humanized inference that contradicts the way which the sculpture was born (by the hand of the artisan or the artist) and contributes to its autonomy. Mater, meaning “mother” is directly related to matter. Here is a device made from the contact with eighteenth-century sculptures attributed to Machado de Castro (1731-1822), famous for his large-scale nativity rocaille scenes, where the simulacrum and simulation exist and no longer have they referent in the real (real in the sense of Lacan, that is, what resists categorically to its symbolic reduction)