This glazed ceramic mask presents a frontal face reduced to elemental signs: eyes rendered as apertures, a nose emerging as a central ridge, and a mouth opening into absence. Rather than functioning as a likeness, the face operates as a symbolic field, where surface, void, and relief collaborate to produce presence. The deep green glaze, fluid and reflective, animates the form, allowing light to move across the surface and activate its sculptural rhythm.
This glazed ceramic mask presents a frontal face reduced to elemental signs: eyes rendered as apertures, a nose emerging as a central ridge, and a mouth opening into absence. Rather than functioning as a likeness, the face operates as a symbolic field, where surface, void, and relief collaborate to produce presence. The deep green glaze, fluid and reflective, animates the form, allowing light to move across the surface and activate its sculptural rhythm.
Crisafi’s approach aligns with modern and contemporary artists who have drawn on non-Eurocentric sources to rethink the human figure beyond naturalism. Like Wifredo Lam, who fused Afro-Caribbean spiritual iconography with modernist abstraction, Crisafi treats the face as a site of convergence between the human and the archetypal. The mask’s frontal authority also recalls Rufino Tamayo’s reimagining of Mesoamerican visual languages within a modern pictorial syntax, where the figure becomes a carrier of cultural memory rather than an individual subject.
Here, the “goddess” is not narrative or allegorical but embodied through material presence. The mask does not depict divinity; it hosts it, proposing identity as a condition that emerges through form, material, and ritual attention rather than representation.
