Limited Edition of 5
40 x 58.5 in
101.6 x 148.6 cm
US $ 4,600
A face assembles itself from the surface of this stone with a patience that seems geological. The bilateral symmetry pulls crevices into eye sockets, ridges into a brow, a central void into something that reads unmistakably as a mouth. The figure is neither human nor animal but contains the memory of both: heavy, frontal, and possessed of a stillness that feels not inert but deliberate, as though the stone had been waiting to be seen from exactly this distance.
A face assembles itself from the surface of this stone with a patience that seems geological. The bilateral symmetry pulls crevices into eye sockets, ridges into a brow, a central void into something that reads unmistakably as a mouth. The figure is neither human nor animal but contains the memory of both: heavy, frontal, and possessed of a stillness that feels not inert but deliberate, as though the stone had been waiting to be seen from exactly this distance.
Ragazzini photographs a fragment of the stone's surface, mirrors the image along its vertical axis, then elaborates the result, drawing out the tonal depth and edge articulation the raw photograph only hints at. What the process ultimately produces is neither predicted nor controlled. The question the process puts to the viewer is not what the artist made but what the material was already holding. The color of this stone, blue-gray and ash, carries a coolness that resists the mythological. What surfaces is not an idol but an impression, precise and impersonal.
That act of reading form from a random surface has a long precedent. Leonardo da Vinci wrote in the Trattato della Pittura that a painter who contemplates old cracked walls will find in them castles, countries, and infinite figures, his counsel being practical: the habit of seeing in random surfaces trains the imagination. Ragazzini inverts the direction of the exercise. He does not use the wall to train his hand toward something else. The wall is the destination.
For a closer look at the making, and the thinking behind the Creature series: What the Eye Finds
