FOCUS BIENNALE: THE JUMPSUIT THEME | SARA ENRICO

In 1919 Thayaht, stage name of the futurist artist Ernesto Michehelles, presents the project for a new concept of dress: the T-jampsuit is a suit with extremely simple and geometric lines whose main feature was the comfort in clothing to facilitate movements.

The Jumpsuit Theme (2022) of Sara Enrico becomes a tribute to the Thayaht’s creation and at the same time the object into which pour his artistic practice: the garment, transformed into sculpture, dialogues with the most existential aspect of human representation and with the technical experiments that characterize the artist’s practice. The series of sculptures, of different colors and sizes, is made by pouring pigmented cement inside the fabric of these suits that reflect the shape of the original Thayaht model. In the phase of cement solidification, the artist moves the bodies making them assume lying positions, often as if they were resting, gently dozing on the floor. The bodies, however, are never reported in their entirety but the artist prefers to focus on very precise areas, like the legs or the torso, to leave a single hint of the anatomical figure and going to abstract the body now fragmented in a series of prostheses. The sculptures also show the texture of the fabric now impregnated with cement and color to recreate a new “skin” in which painting and object, body and culture meet.

The positions taken by these figures create an intimate dimension of human existence: the legs delicately crossed, the torso resting on the floor, other legs curled to emulate a fetal position make the sculpture lose its monumentality. Sara Enrico’s prostheses strike, with their fragility in contrast to the cement rigidity, for the representation of a human being almost sick, not able to stand on his own legs. Off the marble pedestal, now the man is tired and mutilated. The Jumpsuit Theme is neither a tribute to work nor to the human figure, rather the fulminant attestation of a need to devote ourself to rest, to idleness and recovery of energies, in contrast to the accelerated perception of the present that leads to frenetic rhythms and without breaks. The Thayaht suit can, in the work of Enrico, find refreshment, lie down and rest.

Sara Enrico,
The Jumpsuit Theme, 2022, concrete and pigment,
All works with the additional support of Ruben Levi
59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, The Milk of Dreams, 2022
© Photo: Marco Cappelletti, Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia

14/09/2022

Sara Enrico, The Jumpsuit Theme, 2022, © Photo: Marco Cappelletti, Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia