Arma Sacra

“The mind of man is capable of anything because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage who can tell? but truth truth stripped of its cloak of time.”

This is a famous passage from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: man already contains everything within himself not only good, but also evil; not only beauty, but also horror.

Filippo Tincolini uses his art to confront all of us with this truth.

The series ARMA SACRA arises from the realization that throughout history humanity has been capable of creating cathedrals and arsenals, Madonnas and nuclear warheads, statues of liberty and missiles. No hypocrisy, no lies none of us should feel absolved.

If Conrad uses writing, Filippo uses sculpture. In a dictionary, words stand side by side in strict alphabetical order: they share the same space, the same structure.

In the same way, marble exists within the mountain, indifferent to the forms it will eventually become. It is man who extracts it, who chooses and transforms. It is man who introduces difference.

Filippo uses marble not out of reverence for classical sculpture, but because it is an instrument of truth. He chooses marble the same marble through which the West has represented its gods for centuries just as Conrad uses words: everyone can read, everyone can look.

For ARMA SACRA, Filippo selects icons of both good and evil the Pietà, Liberty, the nuclear warhead, anti-personnel mines and returns them to us as works made of the same material, shaped with the same care, placed side by side. He does not separate, he does not judge: he takes what humanity has produced and brings it back onto a single plane.

And here Filippo reveals another truth, perhaps even more unsettling: devotion.

Man is not only capable of building, but also of believing. Devotion does not distinguish: it can be directed toward a mother holding her dead son, or toward an object built to destroy; it can inhabit the silence of prayer as much as the anticipation of an order. In both cases, it asks for adherence, for trust, for a form of surrender.

It is here that the boundary finally begins to fracture.

Because what is worshipped is never only what is good, but what is recognized as necessary, inevitable, just.

In ARMA SACRA, devotion is not represented it is exposed. Marble, once again, takes no position. It receives everything, holds everything, returns everything in the same material.

And it leaves the viewer with a question that cannot be avoided: not what we are looking at, but what we are willing to believe in.