Sinners and Salvation in Miniature

For maestro Lucio Bubacco, the act of blowing glass is metaphorical. Born in 1957 and a lifelong resident of Venice and adjacent Murano (since 1291 the center of Venetian glass making), Bubacco uses the lamp or flame-working technique, a method in which a blowtorch softens canes of glass that are then molded into form and shape. A miniaturist with big ideas, Bubacco unveiled his latest work, Eternal Temptation, at last November’s annual International Sculpture Objects & Functional Art Fair (SOFA) in Chicago, and it has subsequently been the oft-talked about centerpiece of SOFA New York in April and SOFA West Santa Fe, New Mexico, which inaugurated its first edition earlier this month.

A technical tour de force, Eternal Temptation addresses the dilemma—and opportunity—of choice, and seeks to capture its aspects in a Dante-esque manner. Evoking the “Divine Comedy,” Paradise and Inferno are presented as equally beautiful by Bubacco. Like many of the early Italian Renaissance artists, he ponders the integral duality of good and evil but also, like a 20^th-century existentialist, wonders if the choice can be discerned at all, and whether it even matters.

The the room-sized work consists of fifteen large pieces apportioned into three main components—Man on his Journey, the figurative center piece representing heaven and hell; a superstructure of chandeliers, again depicting heaven and hell; and a choral-like background composed of five tall “watchers” and four vessel forms. It manages to be massive in totality while intimate in emotional impact. The reason? For all of its size and many vignettes of dark angels dancing amidst flames and saintly seraphim flying on high, the central figure of the work’s center piece is a single male nude standing with arms outstretched in a gondola-shaped vessel piloted on either end by equally determined oarsmen: one a devil, the other an angel. Reminiscent both of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man and Christ on the cross (and hence combining humanist and Christian artistic icons), this everyman is eternally tempted as well as eternally undecided, a metaphor for humanity in general, artists particularly, and Bubacco specifically (the vessel is not only gondola-shaped but also the color of the Venetian lagoon, bringing the work’s references literally to Bubacco’s own watery backyard).

Although Eternal Temptation was commissioned by Tel Aviv’s Litvak Gallery, which was established in 2006 by Internet entrepreneur Muly Litvak and the worldwide representative of Bubacco’s work, it is not for sale. The artist, however, plans to sell six signed and numbered variations based on eight scenes in Eternal Temptation. A choice, of a kind, is hence afforded to buyers, be they museums, collectors, or venal enthusiasts: To buy, or not to buy?