GIVEN THAT (GIVING DEATH)
Let it be clear: these are not sculptures but toys, and more precisely prototypes of Toys for Melancholics.
They aspire to large-scale industrial production and to indefinite propagation, in proportion to the planetwide diffusion of the anguishastic-desperational Weltanschauung and of the consequent – wholly legitimate, although not absolutely incontrovertible – propensity to suicidefulness. In this sense, our Toys for Melancholics scrupulously respect all the standards of global melancholy quality in a petrified primaeval landscape, courageously yet melifluously addressing a public of adults, kiddies and lithopaedia.
The fundamental characteristics of the authentic «Toy for Melancholics» are (in variable combinations):
a) the modest size and the hairless, reflecting hide, since the melancholic loves touching and stroking his familiar object and turning it over in his grim little hypertrophe's hands, glimpsing in the beloved metallic fetish – or sick monad – both the phantasmatic necessity of his own specular image and a gelid allegory of destiny;
b) the vitreous eyes, which finally reveal to the melancholic the secret animula of the late lamented preschool teddy bear – the repressed infanticide ferociousness and the brephotrophic obsession of which he has already suspected – while at the same time allowing him to indulge in the more mature thoughts of the loss of the aura and of the noble distance of the idol;
c) a slightly simulated and fundamentally ill-concealed vocation to the utensil and to biomorphical mechanics, with particular attention to prosthetic-ornamental graftability and to meta-abortive functionality, as the melancholic is not without a certain feeble taste for mythological-embryonal design and at the same time for surgical virtuosities of a symbolic nature;
d) an immodest, prehistoric, even ludicrous inclination towards the acute excrescence and the transcendental exhibition of the condition of possibility of tooth, spine, quill, claw, beak and rostrum, a gingival Sehnsucht for the sub specie aeterni dentition: the attentive melancholic will also always read in the eye of the dear transitional object the reflection of an intimate, taciturn, claustral yet nevertheless reciprocal aspiration for an investigative dissection of a cannibalistic type;
e) respect for the proportional canon according to which hope is to lollipop (lollip-hope) as the twaddle of the melancholic is to the carillon’s spectral mechanism;
f) the (episodically) disassemblable structure, which, its opening denying the mystery of the interior, untriumphalistically destroys the hated mimetic illusion and reduces once again the vexatious ambitions of the sculpture – the tale, the statue, the monument – to the more pleasant dimension of the toy.