IGOR MITORAJ

The features, the outlines, the musculatures of Igor Mitoraj, are a mixture of Roman-Greek models and the Egyptian and Oriental; if possible more idealized to the point of unattainable beauty, put in evidence by the perfect smoothness of the marble or by the compactness of cast bronze. The figures are, however, deformed in size and the mutilations reduce the opera to a simple fragment, to an archaeological find, as if they have been unearthed.
In the classical mutilated statues, it's the passing of time, with its inexorable and causality, that has rendered the works of art, in perfect in harmony in their wholeness partially legible. For example, in the marble 'Roman couple' 'Discobolo' bronze of Mirone, the tension of the body muscles before the 'throwing of the disc' so intent in transmitting the athletics vigour, that moment of pure stasis so vibrating is clearly perceivable.

It's necessary that the work of art is complete permitting it to become a symbol with the sculpture that allows us to understand the motives of each contraction of the body or of specific expressions. But when time disfigures a sculpture, we don't have an obvious parameter of judgement; it's no longer the plasticity of movement or the static grace that prevail. In this case we notice the details and not the togetherness; we must, therefore, trust the image and admire the beauty of the fragment, reconstructing the total harmony.

Mitoraj seems to exploit these perceptive parameters, using the fragment not to press the reconstruction of a lost unity, testimony of the past, but to offer an interpretation of the present from the point of arrival: the fragment.
He applies to his figures what time has caused to the mutilated classical statues. He decides if 'Venere' will be acephalous, if we will only see the legs of Tindaro, or if the face of Eros will be cut off. This active component is interesting, substituting time and burdens his sculptures even before we have seen them, shocks and sufferings that only the comparison of the cuts or the cracks, with the perfection of the outlines, are able to transmit. Mitoraj reacts knowing that who admires his statues is conscious of encountering contemporary statues, of observing works of art created to be interpreted as fragments and not ideally reconstructed.