Fuocherello

Curated by Gabriele Tosi

Graphic collaboration by Filippo Tappi

28/11/2021 – 13/05/2022

Mysterious rooms appear in the warehouses of Volvera. The substances of the foundry, animated by a certain “fuocherello” (little fire), prepare for a pleasant weekend. But be cautious: strange presences lurk, and the situation could become dangerous.

Articulating *Fuocherello* into installations that traverse the spaces of the artistic complex, Bekhbaatar Enkhtur (Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, 1994) demonstrates “the need to conceive figures as part of an environment” (Camprini, 2021). At the same time, he evokes a lofty visual repertoire, from which references to Eastern cults, nomadic cultures, and the oral transmission of knowledge emerge.
In the upstairs office—characterized by large windows opening on one side to the surrounding nature and on the other to the large workshop—the artist dissolves a silent and measured time. The meditative rhythms of the room, suspended between the earthly world of labor and the spiritual realm of the sky, embody the cruelty of transition, instructing a rituality grounded in the ferocity of formal genesis and the inherent lightness of flight and apparent dematerialization.

Vultures display their talons on yellow slabs. These are casting waxes, the primary material in the transformative and dispersive procedures of sculpture. B.E. engraves their surfaces without altering their processual potential. Like propitiatory signs, the birds of carcasses almost invisibly decorate “what is moldable,” thus making the substance a talisman of itself and celebrating the magical power of castings: translating a form (soul) into different materials (bodies).
At the center of the room, B.E. creates a Lotus Throne in clay. The sacred lotus flower—rising above the aquatic environment yet untainted by it, expressing a symbolic relationship with water that is also intrinsic to clay—is the most common representation in Asia for hosting a figure. B.E. imagines it empty, perhaps waiting for a guest or already occupied by a spiritual entity. Either way, a body (complete with shoes) seems to have passed through it, leaving traces as it walked towards the windows. It is hard to say whether the figure came from the stairs or, like Buddha, emerged directly from the flower. In any case, the artifact seems to have fulfilled its purpose, now suggesting the need to move elsewhere.
The gestural ways in which B.E. manipulates the clay demonstrate how the artist “emphasizes the materiality of the work, creating the illusion of its dematerialization” (Balbi, 2021).

This aesthetic trait visually binds the installation occupying the foundry’s main hall, composed of seven red earth columns and aluminum casts of a pair of guardian felines.
“In the East, the guardian lion is placed at thresholds, emphasizing liminal sacredness, the point where one passes from outside to inside, crossing a space that alters experience and can shift perception. Just as in the medieval European cathedrals, where lions support the columns flanking the great portals. In the West, the lion is a metaphor for Christ protecting the faithful; in the East, a tutelary presence warding off evil and bad spirits” (Lollini, 2021). The recurrence of elements marking the sacred, whether experienced as a temple or a deconstructed pulpit, describes the dimensional weight of the foundry installation, which also integrates the mimicry and absorption of indigenous powders. The red earth of the columns is, in fact, the refractory material used on-site to hold the model’s core during the casting process. From this perspective, B.E.’s columns can be seen as a ritual replica of the red earth cylinders that enter the large ovens daily. Confirming the material process’s transcendental reinterpretation is the circular sun symbol the artist inscribes on each vertical element of his mystical space.

Between the columns, the two sculptures titled *Felines* slip through. The beasts wrestle free from clay blocks, finding in the aluminum casting the skin of temporal fixity capable of officiating trans-dimensional unions in the erotic event of metamorphosis. Western eyes chase Daphne with Apollo and Bernini, but here the pantheistic solution shifts romantic heroism to a different terrain. A lush unknown of collective possibilities yet marked by the fear of impermanence. The animals, in fact, “attack and incorporate other objects; the supports gradually become integral parts, often resting, like real beasts, on makeshift supports such as broken chairs, old pallets, or a wooden cart found nearby” (Balbi, 2021). Even though the aluminum confirms the contract between the feline (divine) and the cart (earthly), the circle does not fully close. The wheels remain mobile, preserving an escape route.

Wandering among the red columns, one feels threatened by the beasts yet dances with them. They are possessed as objects, and one is possessed as spirits. Amidst “the world’s dust” (Bouvier, 2009), one perceives that the true stakes are not transformation itself but controlling the access routes to the indefinable. Seeking in the elemental and primitive contact with matter a perceptual supplement of knowledge and gratitude. “And if the world still has something to reveal to us, it will only be true for those who have the courage, desperation, and joy necessary to surrender to its majestic indifference, its roughness, its intoxicating and suffocating altitude” (Trevi, 2021).