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"Your face is a book, where
men may read strange matters."
-- Shakespeare --
Nine heads, millions of bodies. Nine months to carve them,
all of eternity to live with them.
Overwhelmed by Leonardo da Vinci's drawings of ugly faces,
Khachik Bozoghlian chose nine of them
and turned them into a bizarre but
powerful compendium of moods, feelings and attitudes in which
extreme distortion is the only
common denominator - except for humanness.
Leonardo called his sketches
visi monstruosi (grotesque faces)
and discussed them in his writings on
the human face. Scholars today
believe
he studied them as a means of mastering the physiology of facial
expressions.
"They hold great passion and emotion," says Bozoghlian. "I
see them all the time - on the street, in the subway and in
my imagination. I got interested
in Leonardo's idea and vision and wanted to give another dimension to his "'misshapen
figures.'"
The misshapen is, so to speak, a natural subject for
Bozoghlian, an artist best known for his work in bronze. For many years
now he has rigorously questioned
traditional notions of beauty, particularly its conceptions of the ideal body.
But his recent
work crosses over into a new zone
of awareness. He shocks us into recognizing that honest, loud, self-ironic
ugliness can
attain a kind of perfection all
its own, singular in its naked integrity.
"The nine faces are so stunningly ugly that it turns into
beauty," the sculptor says. "I am mesmerized by these guys."
A lady in the foundry where he bronzed them said that one of
the caricatures looks like herself when she is angry.
Khachik's party of nine does indeed encompass an astonishing
variety of precisely rendered psychological states.
Aggression, joy, fear, anxiety, indifference - all of that
and more are present in the visual eloquence of the heads.
In them raw feeling is transmuted
into understanding. The grotesque becomes wholly familiar. Exaggeration yields
an exquisite naturalness.
But these are not simply masks of individual deformation or
emotions. On the contrary these
heads inspired byLeonardo's sketches tear off the
mask of deception and reveal innermost feelings. Each captures a
deeply
individual identity identity and drive. "It
is nothing like my other work", says Bozoghlian, who seems aware that he has
wrought something remarkable.
Khachik Bozoghlian has never feared the truth - but never before has he put
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