1995 (detail)

1995 (detail) is a work by the Italian artist Graziano Locatelli, who builds sculptural installations into walls and floors using ceramic tiles, mosaic, metal plates, cement and glue. The image shows part of a wall of glossy white rectangular tiles, the kind found in kitchens, bathrooms and subway stations, from which a pale figure appears to be forcing its way out. Its date of making and present location have not been confirmed; the title may refer to a year rather than describe the work.

What you are looking at

On the right, a form wrapped in what looks like a white sheet or plaster skin pushes forward out of the wall. It reads as a hunched human body, head bowed and shoulders hunched, with an arm or elbow driving outward. Its smooth, rumpled surface is the same white as the tiles, as if the wall itself had grown a body.

Around it, the tiles are breaking. Some have popped free and tilt out at angles; others are split by long cracks that run across the wall in fine dark lines toward the left, where whole tiles are fractured but still in place. A few shards cling to the figure's shoulder like debris. The neat grid of the wall, a symbol of order and hygiene, is visibly giving way.

Breakage as a theme

Locatelli has explained that his fascination with broken things began in childhood, among damaged cars and abandoned, ruined villages in the mountains where he grew up. Rupture, the moment when something ordinary is transformed by a break, became the central idea of his work. Here that idea takes a human shape: the figure is both trapped in the wall and escaping it, and the viewer cannot tell whether it is emerging or being swallowed.

The effect is quietly unsettling. Familiar domestic surfaces become the site of a struggle, and the clean white tile, usually invisible, suddenly feels fragile.

Related works

Figures that seem to emerge from architecture are a recurring device in contemporary sculpture. Daniel Arsham's eroded casts in Holding Hands play with similar ideas of surfaces that dissolve, while Kate MacDowell's porcelain in Solastalgia uses white ceramic to suggest fragility and loss. More on the artist at Graziano Locatelli.