A body carrying the curved line of the horizon on his back. A sign chronicled in black ink on a landscape, caught by a wind that changes it into numerous shapes, as concrete as they are abstract. An elegant sign walking calmly upon the earth, effortlessly flying and gliding over the world.
A crow, sometimes the sign of bad luck, because it is occasionally a scavenger and has always accompanied men on the battlefield, through disasters. But also a sign of life.
A being in perpetual change that tries to ground itself in a framework by imitating the animal from which it is meant to distance itself. Open to the four winds, permanently traversed by draughts. From head to toe, air circulates through the orifices of its body. Desperately open.
Faithful sentinel of deserted fields, whose survival is based on constant self-reinvention. Reminiscent of new repellent efforts of modern times, experimenting with scarecrows that are truer to life: the body of a dead bird exhibited in a posture of alarm, ready for flight.
THE SCARECROW
A poet of ancient times who still reigns from the corner of the field, it is difficult to describe the scarecrow: an impostor, a bogeyman, an ogre, a phantom, a protester, a crucifix, a no-through sign, a tower, an hourglass…
For me, a scarecrow is both a touching and contradictory figure, a lonely soldier of terror who has never scared anyone. He belongs to the imagination. This vertical being is man’s double, a self-portrait that does not speak its name, a no-through sign, and a protester who opens his arms to us when he is not hanged, crucified or bound.
This is a being of abandonment, in abandonment.
Giving life to a scarecrow is to become alive again, to revive, reconstruct, and to relearn. Trying to reach that place where the dual movement of vertical falling and elevation is produced, a contradiction vital to a living being.
The difficult birth of a body and a word that are linked and which begin over and over again, in perpetuity.
havran is part of the Scarecrow Cycle, as well as Fidèle à l’éclair and babil. The three figures reunite at last in the work Humus vertebra, the absurd encounter of the three.
A fourth solo, Benedetto Pacifico, joined the Cycle in September 2011.
