SILENT ANATOMY | Johannes Nielsen

His sculptures are classical and the privileged material is bronze, which nevertheless preserves  a dimension of strong contemporaneity, as for example in the series dedicated to human bodies, in which the crisis of modern man finds exemplification in slim figures at the limit of visual endurance, which are decomposed or have discrepancies with respect to their axis, although always remaining faithful to a composure of form that recalls the great sculptural tradition of the twentieth century.

“Nielsen – as written by the art curator Angelo Crespi – deals with the theme of the double, his are truly “dichotomies” which are not, as appears at first glance, a reflection on the double, but on the divided, on the “cut in two” (dicho- temno), as if the recent pandemics and crises have shown humans’ extreme fragility. The bodies appear divided, almost as though a knife had cut the flesh before it solidified, a cut which is irreparable but from which shines the splendour of the polished bronze, contrasting with the rest of the sculpture which is patinated and scratched: “There is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”, as Leonard Cohen would sing, meaning that the virtue of this scission, that is not a “diminutio”, if anything, is the possibility of imagining an elsewhere, of seeing inside or, on the contrary, of making it possible for the inside to come out.”