She defines them as a collection of souls. They are the ones hidden in the structures that Anne-Claire van den Elshout conceived and created as a physical representation of a deep internal concept.
“The pandemic” - explains the artist – “made me reflect on our condition as human beings: weak with our burden of emotions and thoughts”. Alongside the conceptual constraints, the psychological and philosophical difficulties, there were also the physical ones produced by isolation and the limitation of movement. In her own case, the usual trips from Holland to Italy and vice versa. Hence the idea of technologically overcoming geographical barriers. “I used a type of 3D printer that allows you to work with clay” she says.
“My first creation was the "David" whose mask represents prison bars, the symbol of the Lock Down. Then I decided to make portraits of the people around me, trying to catch their emotions and thoughts during Covid with clay: Anxiety and Fear engendered by death, but also Indifference, Joy, Shock and Hope”
The David, silenced by the iron mask, returns in her latest exhibition curated by Virginia Monteverde (it was first exhibited in Genoa, Palazzo Ducale, in the exhibition "Il Respiro dell’Arte", then in Amsterdam). The David takes its place among the invisible souls contained in the repertoire of human heads.
The result is a gallery of expressions caught in a specific moment and transported to another time and another dimension. People’s lives, reconstructed.
They are sculptures obtained layer by layer, as the artist wanted to maintain a distance from reality.
These characters are something other than their own identity. They look forward, each one keeping alive a feeling, a perception, and whoever observes them knows he is faced with a reproduction, a container, and knows that in each of them there is an original element, unique.
It cannot be seen, but it is present, regardless of the mechanical possibility of replicating it: the artist has inserted the highest conceivable content.
Inside these empty heads Anne-Claire van den Elshout wanted to express something inexpressible. She calls it the soul.
