As then, Europa is the symbol of people shifting from the East to the West, of the physical movement of bodies, as well as of travels and discoveries.
David Aaron Angeli
The Mediterranean Sea is like a ring surrounded by different populations; on its coasts, the most ancient continents took form, and the most ancient civilizations. It was the cradle of merchants, of adventurers, and also of simple travellers. On this sea a good many legends flourished which were linked to the foundation of new places.
As a sensitive artist that shapes sculptures with wax – a material of natural origin and of a multi-sensorial consistency (it smells good, and you can touch and admire it; it is sensitive to both light and temperature) and gives building to drawings on paper, David Aaron Angeli interprets, re-imagined in the modern day, one of the ancestral myths gathered around the great water ring which possesses all the traits of the tale ring (Ringkomposition).
It is the story of Europa, a Libyan princess collecting flowers on the beach, who fearlessy approaches Zeus disguised as a bull and is kidnapped by him: a story coming from the earth and returning to the earth via a long sea journey. Europa’s story is the story of migrations and adventures, of love and the wedding not only of the lady and the bull-man-Zeus but also of the East with the West, of men and animals: a cultural meeting, an exchange that means even an offer of oneself. That it is the story of the nostoi (journeys) symbolized by a boat which in its simplest form is but a container of men. The boat is investigated by David Aaron Angeli in the reaction of black wax that reminds us of the wood with the primordial liquid teeming with life: the sea water that ‘paints’ the sculptures with a delicate encrustation of salt. The recognitive path of the artist on Europa’s myth moves on with different levels of complexity in view of his both material and formal research: the cues coming from the narrative are developed in an autonomous way, and they give origin to further interpretations and symbolic ties. The female figure is a personage in the round: a young girl chasing after her dreams, a primordial mother and a devout spouse who holds an archaic power in the house – hinted at by the stick – ready to donate herself to the bull, where the male and animal elements are fused together.
Neither the male element nor the animal element do have the upper hand, and in the only moment when they are actually alone together (in the night, at sea, being ridden by the wind) there is a continual inversion of roles. During the voyage, the animal turns to the boat, from where it is impossible to evade, and the boat brings salvation at the same time; both the god and the lady do experience a migration which, exactly in the same way as today, requires both nudity of soul and abandonment of one’s past in order to acquire new habits with complete openness of mind. The hand and the container bring that idea to a full synthesis. In fact, after a long study of the cups and vases used in the ancient rituals, as well as of the gestural poses in the sacred rites, David Aaron Angeli does unite the object to the human figure, and he stresses, through a blunt figurative language, the ‘ambivalence’ between the carrier and the one being carried. That is what we can detach from Europa’s riding the animal. The myth is not carried as further as the point where the departure and the arrival coincide, because the artist is mostly interested in the spiritual meeting and in the approach that is consumed during the sea crossing. In the same way his paper and wax - two materials generally meant for middle stages in an artistic process - are being worked and chiselled until they reach a complete-ness that does not call any for further interpretation efforts thanks to the highlighted presence of instinctual and primitive traits.
David Aaron Angeli looks only for the essential traits free from decorative tinsels in order to reach purity of form and intensity of meaning. He does not neglect the thread of the narrative notwith-standing the presence of a few minor digressions where the artist puts forward figures of centaurs (the fusion of man and bull), of a Telamon / Atlas (the emblem of the carrier par excellence), and of a man riding a tortoise (an animal with a container shell that suggests the idea of an amphibious vessel).The pace of the story is timed by the presence of one of the symbols most remindful of the eternal return of the cycle of life: that is the mythological ouroboros, which is the snake biting its tail whose iconographic good luck takes us back to ancient Egypt. From its head everything gets started and at its tail everything gets finished. The ouroboros deals with the palingenetic mark that in the exhibition represents the continued reappearing of Europa’s myth through the past centuries up to the present. Similarly to the Mediterranean Sea, the very ouroboros owns the shape of the ring that sanctions inseparable ties like those of a wedding ring. Its etymological meaning pries deep into the Sanscrit root of the word indicating the flow of time, the cycle of years, the courses and recourses of Nature life, deaths and reburial.
Camilla Nacci
