Belfagor is an astronaut’s helmet on a sarcophagus plinth. It's the attempt to capture the space surrounding alpture and give nothingness a physical shape. Void has no boundaries, but even though the statue is solid it may give you a sense of it. The name is taken from an French TV series of the Sixties, Belphégor, le phantôme du Louvre, which haunts the Egyptian Collection of the Museum. 

Belfagor was carved by hand from shell limestone (pietra di Vicenza). The second, slightly modified version of the statue is made of polyurethane painted white.

This ceramic work is made up of 32 tiles (module size 26,5 x 19,5 cm) and is part of a private collection in Rome. The clay body was covered with black and white engobes following the design of an ink drawing that I had realised beforehand. I liked the idea of a module that can be recombined endlessly.

Visual samples, printed on pencil drawings or drawn with ink. The individual sheets are arranged according to a system modeled on the Sephiroth.

The Museum has a huge mouth that looks like a swimming pool and sucks in works of art, inexorably. Once they're in, they're dead. Its classicistic and fascist attributes (entrance portal, caryatids, chimneys) indicate a German nightmare you definitely want to escape. In fact, my first draft (ink on paper, 80 x 60 cm) and the plaster relief based on it (same size) show a person trying to leave the pool. The whole structure has an uncertain perspective that seems to fall backwards toward a gloomy sun. 

I made the final version after a few years spent in Italy and the fleeing figure was gone. The Museum became an irregular tryptich with a ravening hole that attracts the eye and pulls you in if you don't watch out. Yes. That is Rome. But I had escaped the nightmare.