Devils and Angels.
There’s been plenty of speculation over the past twenty-four hours concerning the nature of the post-mortem torments that might await Jerry Falwell now that his soul has departed its corpulent container. Various suggestions I’ve seen run the gamut from the fanciful—being buggered for eternity by purple Teletubbies—to the semi-serious—finding himself in the Third Circle of Dante’s Inferno along with the rest of the gluttons who, so Dante tells us, lie in continual hail and rain whilst eating their own excrement. For a man who spent most of his life talking shit, the latter would seem to be a fitting end.
Devils and Angels (details).
Which disrespectful preamble brings us to another Italian, Lucio Bubacco, and his glass artworks. Bubacco is a Venetian and Venice has long been a centre of excellence in glass-blowing and sculpture. Yet Bubacco excels even by the standards of his birthplace, and his work is a deal more witty, imaginative and finely-crafted than the dull porn glassworks Jeff Koons had produced (by Italians also) for his Made in Heaven series in 1991. Of the work on Bubacco’s site my favourites are those in the “Transgressive” section which includes the marvellous Devils and Angels tableaux shown above, where a complement of masculine angels and demons are arranged about the central pillar in a Kama Sutra of celestial copulation. Not all his work is this outrageous, some is merely sweetly subversive like The Kiss showing an amorous encounter between a satyr and a naked man. That’s still enough to upset Falwell’s Puritan pod people but then they’re beyond our salvation, aren’t they?
• Official site | Lucio Bubacco on MySpace
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The gay artists archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The art of ejaculation
• Czanara’s Hermaphrodite Angel
• Angels 4: Fallen angels
• Angels 1: The Angel of History and sensual metaphysics
• The glass menagerie
Today, in a shop selling Murano stuff, I saw some little statues which I thought might have been done by this guy. Same subject: devils in 5 of the cases and one woman playing with a whip. But I wonder: apart from the fact that the price already looked VERY reasonnable for the pieces, I have the feeling that the statues shown of Bubacco’s site are more intricate, more detailed than the ones I saw. I would have to investigate this further…
Hmm, I suppose he could have licenced some of his designs for mass production. His site doesn’t seem to get updated so there’s no recent news there.
But also he teaches. Maybe this was the work of one of his student.
I’ll investigate.
I was lucky enough to take a class with Lucio Bubacco on the Island of Murano and one of the students saw the same thing one day. It Is one of his former students who has practoused for years. I can do the same subject but its not the same work. So I search for my own subjects.
I for got to say he dosent seem to gard his style and protect it, he sends you from class thinking everything is possable with no limits. Or that was my impression.