In the opening sequence of Pasolini’s Medea, the centaur Chiron and his pupil, Jason, gaze across a gilded, coastal horizon at dusk. Chiron imparts to the young Jason, “Only he who is mythical is realistic, and vice versa.” The line establishes one of Pasolini’s central ideas in the film: rationality does not supersede myth; myth continues to structure reality even when we cease to believe in it. Myth is a mode of vitalization because it is, in a sense, more real than real. It constructs a plane of value that is not limited to fixed categories. An object may be itself and something other than itself, exceeding classification established a priori. The mythical does not question or undermine the sanctity of a material, but imbues it with the potential for illimitable interpretation. In this sense, matter is never entirely stable.
I am in Vienna, rehearsing a play which I insist upon as an extension of my sculptural practice. Seated in a vacated gallery, I nod at the musician, who begins gingerly plucking her lute. After a moment, the actors walk to their starting positions and are still for several bars until the music stops, giving space for the dialogue to begin. These few moments of inactivity are essential: the actors warm the space of performance with their presence––they are hot wax seeping into each crevice of the mold. Even before they move or speak, they impress themselves upon the space that receives them. An actor is chosen for the particular qualities and capacities they bring to a character, just as a material is chosen for the properties it brings to a work. Their intermingling is alchemical. The mold, like the play, exists in anticipation of the matter that will enter it, yet neither can determine in advance the form their encounter will take.
In the 2024 exhibition Medardo Rosso: Inventing Modern Sculpture at mumokand later in Kunstmuseum Basel, visitors first encountered Rosso’s photographs. Arranged along dark vitrine tables, the collection was backgrounded by a semi-transparent partition through which the sculptures beyond appeared diffused. Rosso produced his forms through spontaneous clay modeling, which he subsequently cast in bronze, plaster, or wax. At times, he sought to obscure distinctions among these materials and further manipulated their surfaces: treating plaster to resemble bronze or coating casts in honey-toned wax. The resulting forms are irregular and pockmarked, retaining the impressions of fingers as indices—or shadows—of decisions. The sculptures bear visible evidence of their making and, in this way, invoke theater––there is no curtain to veil the mechanics of the mise-en-scène. Rosso’s sculptural oeuvre consists of a repertoire of only about forty subjects, which he cast and recast throughout his life like a recurring ensemble. The reassessment of these forms extends to some 500 photographs, which were regularly exhibited alongside his sculptures. In Matter and Memory (1896), Henri Bergson conceives matter as an aggregate of images whose vitality lies in its continuous relation to spirit. Material bears memory as memory assumes the form of an image through which the past enters into and impresses itself upon the present; similarly, a mold is itself subject to the repetition it enables: with use, its surface wears, and subsequent casts are subtly degraded by those that preceded them.
In one of the oldest myths of artistic creation, Pliny the Elder tells of a young woman who, faced with the imminent departure of her lover, traces the outline of his shadow upon a wall. Her father subsequently presses clay into the traced contour, giving it volume and tactility. Often cited as the genesis of painting, the story equally proposes an origin for sculpture: the desire to simultaneously preserve a resemblance and to give it form––the latter impulse being in anticipation of absence.
Generally speaking, a subject or surface must be stilled for its likeness to be manually captured, and the resulting form is itself static. Rosso, however, sculpted against the notion of a fixed, or final, state. Working instead through iteration, he was attuned to the subtle shifts in expression that emerged between plaster and wax. The artist further reworked his forms through photography––capturing his pieces in varied lighting conditions, environments, and in relation to other objects. Many of these photographs bear evidence of physical intervention: he scratched, cropped, colored, and otherwise obscured the surface, treating the photograph like sculpture, a medium activated by touch. Mold-making operates through a related logic: the form is transferred, but never without loss.
Rosso’s Impression d’omnibus (1884-5) was a near life-size plaster sculpture of five people seated on public transport. Though the figures occupy the same vignette, they appear to bear no relation to one another; each looks ahead, absorbed in their interior world. Several years after its creation, the sculpture was broken in transit from Rosso’s studio and could not be exhibited. He nevertheless restaged and photographed the damaged work, continuing to reimagine its image long after the sculpture itself had ceased to exist. In this instance, the photograph no longer functioned as documentation; it became another incarnation of Impression d’omnibus.
In his photography, Rosso deploys a form of Chiaroscuro; he lends his figures to shadow, allowing for darkness to cloud the eyes and recess the lips. He supplants his three-dimensional figures in the negative, photographic night, a sort of cave, or primordial realm. At the turn of the twentieth century, the new technological medium, with its lightness and portability, was seen as secure, in contrast to objects, which are inherently vulnerable. A snapshot, like a sculpture, is a discrete set of elements enduring in time. Consistent and varied photo-documentation reanimates form, cheats stagnancy, even death. One plans and poses a photograph, but the result of their effort can never be entirely predicted. Within Rosso’s practice, photography serves less as a means of fixing the sculpture than a means of returning it to variation. Rays of light, extension of shadow, and flecks of dust all inform the final result. Such aberrations contribute to the living quality of the photograph.
The sculptures, too, possess a lifelike quality; roughhewn edges give way to faces that border on uncanny. Discussing Rosso in the Wienerwald, my companion expressed his distaste for the work, referring to the sculptures as “violent”. Though this specific word had not occurred to me, I remember photographing the interiors of some of Rosso’s heads and being struck by the brutality of their exposed armatures—wire bound to jutting plywood. To confront the exposed contents elicits a certain unease, the discomfort of seeing what ordinarily remains concealed from the exhibition audience. I think again of theater, where interior and exterior are similarly conflated. Antonin Artaud describes the capacity of live performance to instigate “beneath language a subterranean current of impressions, correspondences, and analogies”––a sort of resonance chamber. The mold evokes a cave: material retreats beneath the protective husk, suspended from view as it is inscribed upon, and ultimately assumes another form.
When the Medardo Rosso exhibition was on view at mumok, I visited often, having then called Vienna home. Now I return to the museum with this text in mind. The subterranean galleries are currently dedicated to an exhibition by Tolia Astakhishvili, which incorporates works from the museum’s collection. Recessed within the show, in a dimly lit vitrine, rests a single figure by Rosso, The Bookmaker (1895), recalling his retrospective two years prior. The sight of it produces a flash of recognition, followed by a visceral return of physical memory from that winter in Vienna. Isn’t this the experience of participating in art—to be haunted by what one has already encountered, to have past and present acts of viewing momentarily overlap? A haunting is, after all, a form of return that does not reproduce the original conditions of presence.
The Bookmaker, identifiable as an elderly figure by way of his leaning posture, faces a painting of a newborn baby by the late modernist Ull Hohn. Identified by his trade, the bookmaker is a chronicler, set to the impossible task of recording an infinitely escaping present. Across from him is new life, not yet weighted by the accumulation of its own past.
The exhibition catalogue offers further reflections on Rosso’s photographic practice. The artist frequently conceived the staging of his sculptures as a form of mise-en-scène, photographing or photomontaging them alongside other artworks. In one instance, he photographed Enfant à la bouchée de pain (Child with a Bite of Bread) (1897) in front of Cézanne’s Cinq baigneuses (Five Bathers) (1880-1882), casting the two works in a scene charged with libidinal suggestion. Rosso also created sculptures that contain scenes within themselves. In La conversazione (1897), three figures emerge from an amorphous base, clustered together in a familiar encounter. He photographed the piece extensively: sometimes cropping the image close, foregrounding the intimacy between the two women. Other photographs are taken from the male figure's perspective––depending on one’s interpretation, he gazes at the women admiringly, curiously, or suspiciously. Through the use of foreshortened perspective, Rosso re-stages the relationships between the figures, expanding or collapsing the psychic space between them.
Among Rosso’s late, more experimental photography is Donna sortendo di camera (Woman Leaving the Room) c.1925, which features an illuminated silhouette that appears to emerge from sun-speckled water. Despite the title, the vaguely distinguished ‘woman’ does not seem to emerge from any sort of interior space, bringing to mind that “room” translates to “camera” in Italian. The woman leaving the camera, the realm beyond material determination, is a rare instance of a photograph by Rosso that does not take one of his sculptures as subject.
Rosso’s highly iterative practice resists the certainty of a final state. The mold anticipates presence; the image anticipates absence––each is charged by what it does not yet, or no longer, contain. This cavity gives way to the mythic, whose potential expands as space opens to receive it. I return now to the inaugural, waterside scene, wherein Chiron’s “vice versa” may suggest that the mythical and the real are not opposing states, but rather, conditions contained within one another.