Sculpture: ‘Reptilia’
Tamara Kvesitadze is well known for her animated
sculptures, in which complex movements and rotations
give an appearance of life to her creations,
through an endless and cyclical metamorphosis, with
a permanent tension between the organic and the
mechanical, the artificial and the living. Like the
young Cnidian with Praxiteles’ Aphrodite, we are all
ready to succumb to this illusion of reality, mistaking
the artificial body of silicon (the modern marble of
today…) for real flesh, wanting desperately to believe
that these sculptures are not actually moved by small
motors, but by true muscles and hearts. Three such
installations are exhibited here. The newest one,
‘Reptilia’, is a moving spine to which are attached
twenty-five bodies of aluminium, with twenty-five
blank and veiled faces of silicon, rotating slowly
under a canopy. Their classical look and their faded
half-tones are a stark contrast to the red violence of
the first sculpture. This is a sculpture of fragments,
pieces combined to form a whole, a monument of unity
and of diversity, of permanent metamorphosis and
of constant struggle against standardisation.