Antonio Canova

In December 1917, a projectile burst through the roof of the Plaster Cast Gallery of Possagno, exploding into thousands of pieces and mutilating Antonio Canova's plaster casts. Over time, this ravaged art would prove to be an extraordinarily intense and effective testimony. Canova's wounded statues, which look like actual tortured bodies, seem to stand in for the soldiers who fell victim to the Great War, whose deaths were sistematically covered up, whether out of expedience or discretion.
The catalogue features the haunting photographic documentation of these works taken at the time by Stefano Serafin. One hundred years later, Guido Guidi and Gian Luca Eulisse turned their gaze on these same statues. The two photographers reinterpret Canova's mutilated and shattered plaster casts, creating a series of images in which the bodies speak again. Although they are only sculpted bodies, distinctly injured and maimed, they cannot be silent, for they are enduring witnesses of war, the most tragic and injustifiable chapter of the human experience.

Plaster Cast Gallery of Possagno, Treviso, July 2015 - February 2016