DN — WARDROBE — Collection 02

About the work

The body has always been the first material.

Alabaster is the most sculpturally resolved work in DN — WARDROBE a figure in which the garment and the body have become indistinguishable, where the mechanical architecture of the android form has been refined to the point where it reads not as engineering but as carving. The thoracic volumes are continuous and uninterrupted, their surfaces following curves that belong to the vocabulary of classical sculpture as much as to industrial design. The shoulder articulation is precise without being aggressive. The arm describes an arc of quiet, self-contained power.

Di Nicolantonio draws here in the tradition of the great figurative sculptors not imitating them, but arriving at the same understanding through a different discipline: that the human form, rendered with sufficient attention and sufficient restraint, becomes its own argument for beauty. The android body in Alabaster does not augment or replace the human figure. It distils it removing everything contingent, everything temporary, everything that was never essential, until what remains is the pure geometric logic of a body that has been thought all the way through.

The face inclines. The eyes are nearly closed. The expression is one of complete self-possession not detachment, not absence, but the particular quality of a figure that has nothing left to prove and has arrived, finally, at rest.

In DN — WARDROBE, Alabaster is the still centre of Collection 02. The work that reminds you, in the middle of all the velocity and transformation, what the collection is ultimately about: the enduring beauty of form.

An original drawing from DN — WARDROBE by artist-futurist Sébastien Di Nicolantonio.