For starters, the torso’s contrast with the dough-covered face heightens the body’s sense of armouring even though, ironically, it is bare and thus unprotected. And the photos’ layered allusions augment this complexity. For example, the dough’s obscuring of the model’s face recalls the sculptural illusions of figures seen through stone shrouds, from Giuseppe Sanmartino’s 18th-century trompe l’oeil to the subtle, affecting fin de siècle abstraction of Medardo Rosso (whom Curreri cites as a reference, if not as an influence).
Less literally, the play between the model’s smooth body and the dough’s uneven texture conjures Michelangelo’s stone ‘sketches’, especially his Saint Matthew (1503–06) wherein contrast between finish and roughness suggests a figure emerging from stone rather than receding into it. While fainter than the ‘veiling’ references, these echoes foreground this series’ existential undercurrent. To be ‘beside oneself’ means to be so emotionally overcome as to feel out of one’s skin. Curreri’s desire to double up on this expression’s figurative aspect – to make the muscleman his doppelganger – comes through in the publicity shot. This image, which appears only on the publicity material for the exhibition and thus frames the show rather than participating in it, depicts the artist positioning the dough between the model’s shoulders. Because Curreri stands behind the model, and they both crook their elbows, the model’s physical perfection and psychological anonymity mirror and invert the artist’s intellectual acuity and relative physical normality, while the artist seems poised to merge with the model.