Sorbonne Artgallery

Polycorps Polyptych

Polyptyque d'un Polycorps

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"Polyptych, the nine images presented are a sort of traveling on my previous work and at the same time on a future project, a wide landscape where plastic, organic, metallic, architectural (and so also textual) materials sketch a world where man is physically absent but psychologically present. It is a matter of staging several stories in a new story of images. In the description of the works there is no indication of size nor of proportion. What we can call "artist's jewel" is an enormous sculpture, a monumental installation that suddenly becomes minuscule, a painted landscape becoming miniature. The most recent works meld with historic works, models built in the '60s/'70s/'80s in a famous french architecture office, have become cities— stalactites. The skulls and bones of birds, found over the course of the last ten years during errances in the woods of Tuscany, take the appearance of hybrid sculptures. The idea is to overturn hierarchies between the disciplines, to paint a landscape from resin on a real landscape, to dynamite classic goldsmithery, where the precious becomes color and integrates itself in the work, like in the past, inpainting, when natural pigments were mixed with oil colors. In this case the precious thing is painting material… The installations, the monuments  to come, take into consideration this time of making, this malleable material." F.C.

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​Faust Cardinali, with this polyptych of the Sorbonne, elucidates or further hides the history of hte discovery of its polyvinyl primary matter. With a singular sense of recovery of the landscape,  of resistance to the persistence of the (found) object, of reflection on the place of today's animal, of positioning in architecture with regard to the environment, the artist proposes a totally personal conception of the museum to finally be able  to tackle the notions of scale and dimension of a work. The idea here is to interrogate the notion of sculpture at a time in our history where all relief seems to abolish itself of fact. Might the shift from polyptych to polycorps announce a new body?

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Faust Cardinali practices three art forms: painting, sculpture, and goldsmithery simultaneously. One influencing the other.

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His jewelry is often objects that explain and reveal the other disciplines. Sometimes in an exaggerated manner… The jewelry decoding the message while the painting inscribes it. His work, treating the extreme violence of the raw material, opposes the refinement or even grace of the final product. For more than thirty years, Faust Cardinali practices his work around the idea of a society transformed by the ideal formes of stalagmites and stalactites. The time that passes is organically a non-toxic plastic material— since polycorps are living beings, conceived by a romantic encounter between humans. The resin that flows from the pictorial space is symbolically sap, organic, plastic, and semantic matter. The aesthetic of science fiction evokes a form of convoluted archeology: the platified architectures are inhabited by resistant absentees; the original models of the architects Andrault et Parat from the '60s/'70s, salvaged by the artist, were submerged during an indeterminate period in resin and became tentacular sculpture of metaphysical and organic aspect. The artist convoluted the original architects' project of building homes in order to give it a new life by transforming it into a sculptural work in its own right. In Faust Cardinali's process, a ritual of transformation always appears in the artist's work like a manifestation of liberatory actions, of a body still human but already cyborg, equally work tool that sparks installations. "The jewelry of the artist can become paintbrush, paperclip, screwdriver; it is set of jewels or shield; it is situated at the same level as a painting by Picasso! It is not more decoration or accessory but art in its own right." Stakeholder in the polyptych that he is, Faust Cardinali is a polycorps.

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Faust Cardinali è un artista totale. In lui arte e vita si compenetrano realmente in una circolarità di tecnica e poetica che è potenza del pensiero nel quotidiano, atto creativo che scompagina le regole, parola che definisce: le sue opere non sono simili a nulla, impossibile catalogarle in qualche stile o tendenza, appartengono ad un paradigma che conduce verso nuovi mondi e dimensioni.  Il suo stesso nome ( il destino nel nome!) riporta ad una curiosa combinazione concettuale che bene racconta la persona, come se l’espressione latina nome omen qui davvero risuonasse di nuovi significati: Faust, il medico-teologo tentato da Mefistofele (e quale tentazione migliore per un orafo il segreto alchemico?) è legato ad un cognome che richiama la religiosità; una tensione tra forze opposte – sacralità e sfida alla materia – che, pur mediata da una visione panica come ode alla vita, è sempre presente nel suo lavoro.