~You will never understand what your caresses leave on me...~
Riccardo D'Avola-Corte
Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah
July 14 - August 20, 2019
Final Hot Desert is pleased to present You will never understand what your caresses leave on me..., Riccardo D'Avola-Corte's first solo exhibition in The United States, installed on the world famous Bonneville Salt Flats. The exhibition features D'Avola-Corte's sculptures formed from different species of dehydrated palms, polyurethane, and other mixed media.
A drama between nature and humankind, between two lovers, and an eventual internalized resentment and post-traumatic horror. A toxic, obsession-based, star-crossed relationship full of lust, jealousy, and spastic releases of tension.
A twin-flame exchange in which two souls' filmy topographies are spread across each other to the point that the idea of being together sounds like an ecstasy-laced suicide pact - so possible - but too definite to comprehend.
Riccardo D'Avola-Corte
Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah
July 14 - August 20, 2019
Final Hot Desert is pleased to present You will never understand what your caresses leave on me..., Riccardo D'Avola-Corte's first solo exhibition in The United States, installed on the world famous Bonneville Salt Flats. The exhibition features D'Avola-Corte's sculptures formed from different species of dehydrated palms, polyurethane, and other mixed media.
A drama between nature and humankind, between two lovers, and an eventual internalized resentment and post-traumatic horror. A toxic, obsession-based, star-crossed relationship full of lust, jealousy, and spastic releases of tension.
A twin-flame exchange in which two souls' filmy topographies are spread across each other to the point that the idea of being together sounds like an ecstasy-laced suicide pact - so possible - but too definite to comprehend.
These spiny, dehydrated palms drowning in the very polyurethane that shapes them into emotional daggers are the pain-drenched substitutes for the cultural monuments smashed among the throws of jealousy and rebounding fits of religious fervor. Spiraling palms cut into themselves as they tumble into a kind of frozen psychedelia in which they puncture everything around them, including themselves.
Lovers jealous of their own multiplicity in a boundless relationship apply pressure at each others’ throats as they press their skin together in an explosive passion, tumbling through time, leaving cuts, scars, and mushroom cloud blemishes on once flourishing
surfaces. It is in nature’s emotional exhaustion that its soft, reactive, and beautiful chlorophyll panels shrivel into hardened, angry spines. Subsequently it is humankind’s resins, philosophies, pours, politics, and concretes that envelope nature over again, restructuring their own divides over their lovers’ tectonic shoulder blades. The relationship is a torture chamber in which both parties are drawn and quartered by one another in their own acts of love, selfishness, and jealousy of being more and less, screaming and silent, permeable and hardened, bold and insecure, safe and at the brink of ego death - all with earnest hands clasped tight.
These sculptures are frozen exchanges of body heat split between the friction of a passion held between lovers that slowly drag each other into the spiraling depths of existential depression. Humankind prays for Mother Nature’s affection as they suck the blood from her neck. She shakes their foundations and drowns their cities as she holds them in her gentle arms. Their love is a jihad of ecstasy, a green and blue sphere spinning around a ball of dizzy fire in a fractal black expanse.
Special thanks to Dr. Manlio Speciale and the Botanical Garden of Palermo for their generous specimen donations
Photography by Ben Sang
Photography by Ben Sang