When I conceived Christ, I was not interested in making an image, nor in reinterpreting a figure that has already been endlessly represented. My concern was to create an event of consciousness — a condition in which material and perception could meet without the mediation of narrative or doctrine. The work does not depict; it invites. It asks the viewer to suspend recognition, to enter a space where seeing itself becomes the subject.
The sculpture consists of twenty-five meters of jute rope, one centimeter in diameter, pigmented with iron oxide and enclosed within a transparent glass vitrine. Every aspect of this construction is deliberate. Jute, an industrial fiber, is both coarse and organic; it carries the memory of labor, of hands, of the earth. Iron oxide, in its deep red tone, evokes rust, soil, and blood — the substances through which time and transformation announce themselves. The glass, in contrast, introduces an atmosphere of distance and precision. It isolates the object while exposing it fully to light. Together, these materials form a dialogue between touch and transparency, weight and air, immediacy and reflection.
Materiality is my point of departure. I am drawn to substances that resist monumentality, that refuse preciousness. In Christ, the rope’s coiled form establishes a rhythm between containment and expansion, between the finite and the infinite. It suggests an inward spiral — a gesture of attention rather than proclamation. The sculpture’s dimensions are exact: twenty-five meters, one centimeter. These measurements are not arbitrary; they bind the metaphysical to the empirical. Scale here becomes a form of devotion, an act of discipline through which the immaterial can momentarily take form.
I think of Christ not as an object but as a field — a site of encounter between material presence and conscious perception. The work is complete only in the moment it is seen, yet it does not perform for the eye. It does not offer a narrative to interpret, but a condition to inhabit. In this sense, it resists the expectations of both religious iconography and modern spectacle. It proposes that meaning arises not from representation but from the intensity of awareness.
The decision to title the work Christ was not theological. It was not a statement of belief but a gesture toward a historical and psychological field that has shaped Western perception for centuries. The figure of Christ represents perhaps the most overdetermined symbol in our cultural memory — an image so saturated with representation that it risks becoming invisible. To name the work Christ was to expose that saturation and to test whether meaning could still survive the collapse of its symbols. The question underlying the piece is simple yet demanding: what remains when the image of faith is removed, and only the conditions of faith — silence, attention, presence — remain?
The installation of Christ at the XV Florence Biennale transformed the work in ways I could not entirely anticipate. Florence, with its Renaissance legacy, is a city built upon representation — upon the conviction that the divine can be made visible. To place my work there was to confront that heritage directly. In the studio, Christ existed as a self-contained meditation. Within the Biennale context, surrounded by centuries of iconography, it became a counterpoint — a refusal to compete on representational terms. The work’s austerity and restraint positioned it not as a rejection of the sacred but as a redefinition of it. Spirituality, in this context, no longer resided in image or narrative but in the experience of perception itself.
The glass vitrine introduced a further layer of meaning. It simultaneously protects and distances, elevates and isolates. That transparent boundary creates a paradox: it denies physical contact but invites mental proximity. Viewers could not touch the rope, but their gaze could enter the space of the work. The vitrine turned the sculpture into a contemporary reliquary — a vessel of attention rather than of relics. This separation is not an obstacle but a condition of encounter. The sacred, after all, has always operated through thresholds — moments where the tangible and the intangible meet yet never merge. The glass becomes that threshold: a medium through which the visible is transfigured into reflection.
In this sense, Christ is less about religion than about the mechanics of perception and belief. Religion provides symbols to mediate transcendence; art can strip them away to reveal the raw experience that precedes them. My intention was to return to that origin — to the moment before doctrine, when the need to encounter what exceeds us first arises. The sculpture is an attempt to reconstruct that moment within the language of contemporary material practice. Its silence is not emptiness but a space charged with potential, where perception can rediscover its own depth.
I believe that in the contemporary condition, the sacred must be reimagined as an act of attention. We are surrounded by images that claim to signify, yet few that invite us to perceive. Christ proposes that perception itself — when fully engaged — is a form of devotion. The act of seeing becomes the act of believing. The material, in its humility, becomes the mediator between awareness and being. To experience the work is to encounter a kind of equilibrium: between touch and thought, matter and spirit, visibility and invisibility.
Ultimately, Christ is a meditation on presence — on how the simplest materials can articulate the most complex states of consciousness. Its quietness is deliberate. Its refusal to represent is its statement. I am not seeking transcendence through form, but recognition of the sacred within the ordinary — within the fiber, the pigment, the light. The work is not a depiction of faith, but an experiment in its reconstruction. In that sense, Christ is not an image to be viewed, but a condition to be entered — a material prayer rendered in silence.
