Limited Edition of 5
40 x 48.0 in
101.6 x 121.9 cm
US $ 4,600
The surface of this tree bark is almost entirely dark, a close field of fissures and ridges in deep brown and black from which a face emerges with the gravity of something long established. The hollows that serve as eyes are layered depths, the bark falling away in stages rather than opening into empty voids. The mouth is a horizontal split, the grain running through it like a current. The presence is frontal, ancient, and watchful: a face that belongs to the tree.
The surface of this tree bark is almost entirely dark, a close field of fissures and ridges in deep brown and black from which a face emerges with the gravity of something long established. The hollows that serve as eyes are layered depths, the bark falling away in stages rather than opening into empty voids. The mouth is a horizontal split, the grain running through it like a current. The presence is frontal, ancient, and watchful: a face that belongs to the tree.
Ragazzini photographs a close section of the bark, capturing the dense interplay of ridges, knots, and the accumulated scars of growth. The mirroring draws out the bilateral symmetry already latent in the wood's structure, and then the image is worked to its full depth: the restrained palette of brown and black is refined until each fissure and layered hollow holds its maximum presence. Color offers no distraction from the form that has declared itself.
The face that surfaces from this bark carries a quality that exceeds the visual argument of pareidolia. It belongs to what the art historian Aby Warburg called Pathosformeln: charged gestures and presences that survive across centuries in the materials of culture, re-emerging when conditions allow. Frontal, apotropaic woodland faces, found in trees understood to guard and to warn, constitute one of the oldest such lineages. Ragazzini did not place this lineage in the bark. The bark placed it. He found the frame in which it became visible.
For a closer look at the making, and the thinking behind the Creature series: What the Eye Finds
