AUREA.
CGI animation, 3’30’’ loop, 2023
Commissioned for Ortung 13, Schwabach Gold Biennale
Aurea reimagines Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne through a choreography of golden particles. Using procedural animation, the seventeenth-century marble sculpture dissolves and reassembles in shifting waves of matter. Revisiting Daphne's metamorphosis as both an escape from violence and a transformation of the body, the work explores the unstable boundaries between human and nature, form and dissolution.
About the work.
Taking its starting point from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Aurea revisits the myth of Daphne, who transforms into a laurel tree to escape Apollo's pursuit. Bernini's seventeenth-century sculpture captures the instant of this transformation, suspended between human and vegetal form.
Through procedural CGI, the sculpture's digital model is fragmented into particles, cellular-like structures and fluid streams of gold. Its solid form becomes a continuously shifting field of matter, moving between dissolution and reconstruction.
By destabilising the idealised female figure of classical sculpture, Aurea also questions the objectification of the female body. Daphne's metamorphosis carries an inherent ambiguity: she escapes possession, but at the cost of her human form. The work explores this tension between violence, resistance and transformation, shifting attention from the body as a fixed image of beauty to the forces through which it is made and unmade.
Installation views
Carme Daste Digital Art Prize
Brescia, Italy, 2023
Installation at Schwabach Gold Biennale 2023
Xposed Gallery - New York
Details, credits, exhibitions
Critical Perspective
“Aurea draws inspiration from the episode of Apollo and Daphne in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In the myth, the god develops an obsession for the nymph Daphne - who has pledged to remain a virgin; while the nymph is chased by Apollo and in fear of being caught, she prays to her father to grant her refuge and is transformed into a laurel tree. Aurea explores the myth by drawing from Bernini’s seventeenth-century sculpture, so as to destructure it and fragment it into its corpuscular elements, which have a distinct 3D tactile quality and evolve into waves of dynamic energy and movement in a process of alternate embodiment/disembodiment within the transformation/metamorphosis.
In the decomposition of matter and the body, we can also see an attempt by the artist to counteract the male gaze and the objectification of women’s bodies. In Aurea, the female body – Daphne’s - dissolves from marble into grains of gold. For Daphne her beauty has been a burden from which she asks to be relieved: Aurea searches for the aesthetic beauty within the tactile elements of which matter is composed.
From the catalogue of HERE AND NOW: ARTISTS VIDEOS FROM UK, Ca Foscari Short Film Festival 2025
Presented by Dr. Laura Leuzzi
Art Historian and Curator, Robert Gordon University, United Kingdom.
LINK TO CATALOGUE
Details from Bernini “Apollo and Daphne”
EXHIBITIONS 2023.2025
Dreamscapes. Xposed Gallery, New York. Curated by Anna Bouali and Ioginality (solo)
Elevision Media. Public Art Screening. Dubai. Curated by Rebia Naim.
Here and Now: Artists Videos from UK. Ca Foscari Short Film Festival. IT
Digerati Emergent Media Festival . US
Carme Daste Digital Art Prize. Winner. IT. Carme Brescia
Ortung 13. Schwabach Gold Biennale. Germany (solo)
PROJECT DETAILS
Medium: 4k Digital Video. Dimensions Variable.
Length. 3’30’’ Loop
Year: 2023
Sound: The Ladder Cloud Thing, Michele di Martino, Filippo Nardini
Commissioned: Schwabach Gold Biennale for Ortung 13, Germany
Other projects
Aurea. Print
Victory.
The Beautiful One Has Come.