S.O.S. Symphony creates a contemporary revision of the subject of death (Tanatos), in its sculptural representation. It alludes to the disappearance of the physical existence, the transcendence of the body and the fatality of death.

As in former projects, the central setting of S.O.S. Symphony has been the water, with all the symbolic scope it conveys. The reflection, the metaphor of the mirror, the world of ideas, the immaterial, the changing and the allusions to the world and the intangible.

The exposition is structured in two different spaces.

A first space, regular and structured, situated at the upper floor of the gallery, composed of one unit, which is an acoustic sculpture and reproduces a rhetorical symphony made by the cry of a little rodent situated in the centre of the room. This rat appears floodlit in a totally dark space. The rodent straightens up to a microphone which, hanging down from the ceiling, amplifies its cry and projects it at the whole room. The walls are “decorated” with butterflies of bones adorning the dark with their lightgrey shadow and a range of colour very near the black.

In the second space, on the ground floor, in bigger dimensions than the previous, and in this case of irregular proportions and low ceilings, there are arranged drawings of big size (200 x 100cm), resetting the space, reconstructing it and forming a unitary ensemble. These drawings represent captured persons, which we could see as static mirrors of the appearances they are locking up. They are hurt, frozen. Their images (phantoms) are an “Ode to Tanatos”, a last reflection of their inert presence. The beginning of their end.

The attitudes of the represented characters are locking in expressions of sadness and mourning. They are focussing other drawings fixed in a horizontal position, floating slightly over the floor. Their natural dimensions are bringing the spectator near to the shown character and, suddenly, he finds himself in the other’s world, turning into an intruder in this somehow claustrophobic space.

The drawings show the spectator an open path by making each person see in his darkness what his eyes can make out. The graphic pieces are growing from the plain picture into a simultaneously tetra-dimensional space. In them the time, broken, gives room for eternity, for the timeless, the anteroom of the finite, the “in-world”, the dark presence of the absent.

Aaron Lloyd