Poseidon

This Poseidon is powerful and dazzling. It is a ruler of the waves in a sea of surreal colours. Vigorous and granitic as a Prometheus, a Titan warrior, resistant to the bitter end but at the same time protective and fatherly, this giant is amongst the fluctuating creatures of an enigmatic and iridescent marine world. It is a double-act of power and softness: the right hand ideally holds a spear or a shield, while the left greets and protects the little beings. This fusion of power and softness, portrays the emblematic he-man archetype seen through women’s eyes and the whole piece is built to give shape to a rhetorical and anti-heroic vision of the sea god. To give shape to this expression, the Artist, a woman, has chosen a mature male’s body as a model: the harmonious force and dynamic lines of the figure and the powerful hands unveil a sign of reassuring power. Neptune’s bust explodes from the waves and even in its static plasticity, expresses a firmness full of energy, aroused by the strong statuary muscles, shaped by an intense moral and athletic discipline, leaving no space whatsoever, for improvised strength. Poseidon is the artistic transposition of a strong manly image, worthy of his power, which symbolizes the perfect point of balance between body and soul. The work captures the deepest sense of the meaning of true physical and moral strength: idle on itself, in the midst of the waves of life, ready to defend, but also to protect and accommodate. This force is conventionally accompanied to be represented in the iconographic style of beauty. But here the ideal of beauty is not entirely classical; it is not deprived of the naturalness of a body that gives itself in a photograph, without aesthetic obsessions. The marked virility of Poseidon does not leave room for any vulgarity, even in the hint to male sexuality, that the Artist has deliberately sought and rendered, by inserting a myriad of natural elements, that blend elegantly into a web of cross-references between marine forms and chromatic alchemies. The predominant colour in the whole piece, is the depth of navy blue, stated in all its shades. Its intensity almost makes you feel the cold shiver of the abyss, where Poseidon, god and man together, dominates as absolute master, almost motionless between the whirls of currents and trajectories of marine creatures. The colours are superimposed, winding up one over the other, transfiguring the entire composition into a terrific ethereal dreamlike atmosphere. Furthermore, the magic transfiguration of colour is the peculiar character of this Artist’s poetics.

Emanuela Torlonia Dottorini