The Disconcertingly Honest Self-Portrait Sculptures of Monica Piloni
The body is an obsession for Monica Piloni. Whether it’s a hollowed face in the Samieses series or the eerie dolls depicted in “Ilegais”, a majority of Monica Piloni’s sculptures confront the human form. And while consistently returning to the body may seem confining to some, it’s a pursuit marked by liberation for the Brazilian sculptor. “I think that making art and looking at the body as an object of research is a way to break free from the bowels, guts, and drives, and for a few moments, to break free from desires,” Piloni says, in an interview with Hi-Fructose Magazine, “those desires which when realized, are immediately replaced by others.”
It was during her years at Escola de Musica e Belas Artes do Parana that Monica Piloni’s professional relationship with the human form began. She refers to her time in school, exploring the figurative in certain courses and rejecting it in others, as “enriching and disturbing.” And it’s where this fascination was birthed for the artist (and where she graduated in 2002). “All of the art students in the world probably went through this experience and later abandoned human figure completely,” Piloni says. “It never happened to me. It wasn’t a matter of choice; I simply could not express myself through another symbol but the human figure. I felt like I was moving in a certain direction and I didn’t want to cause resistance.”
Piloni sees the human form as an endless muse. Though over the years, she’s found varying ways to depict, research, and communicate with her source material. It’s not just her varied bodies of work that have taken several approaches; her process has also evolved. She tried to work with live models a handful of times, but a problem arose: She sees her role as not only to look at a model, but to touch it. That can be a bit invasive for some, and as lifecasting can be uncomfortable or worse for subjects, Piloni decided to use just one model going forward: herself. Piloni says that her primary source of inspiration is anguish, rooted in her relationship with her body and “consciousness of being tied up and stuck to the fibers of meat in metabolic, steady action.”
“After a few drawbacks I realized that I was the most willing live model to make any sacrifice,” Piloni says. “Since then, I have worked with self-portraits. The human form that appears in my work is my own body. Of course I’m like any other, after all we are all human, and without going into detail about gender, we are the same species. I came to find out that building a body, reversing certain parts of it, using for example two left legs, cut them in half or in parts—breasts, vaginas, faces—the real challenge is choosing the material that will be able to sustain all of this idealization of form.”
That started with the classical modes, like bronze and marble. (Piloni recommends that any person, artist or not, should try carving a block of marble.) Yet, when pursuing emulation of the human body further, Brazil was wanting in terms of access to special effects materials, found plentiful
in regions like the West Coast of the U.S. So she sought raw materials from warehouses and stores. Fiberglass, resin, wood, leather, velvet—Piloni’s works are comprised by whatever suits her vision. She often begins with a stage of pre-production—a with a drawing, model, or photograph. This serves as the foundational first step, followed by the engineering, construction, measuring, and choice of goods required to bring the piece to life. Piloni says she leaves room for surprises, with her tactile pursuits of emulating flesh in dialogue with the more surreal objectives of each work. That push and pull creates a synthesis for the artist.
“I feel that making art is like putting the concept ahead of the matter and in this confrontation there will be a fight,” Piloni says. “If these two forces are equivalent, they will fall in love and merge. The technique is the passion to merge the concept to the material and the artist to his or her libido.”
Her current home of Sao Paulo shares a coast with Rio de Janeiro, and it’s ten hours from where she went to school, in Curitiba, the capital of the state of Paraná. When asked how the city informs her work, though she never depicts urban landscapes or other obvious citified markers, the artist simply describes geography as “a detail.” Though she does recall her first years spent with the city.
“As frightening and hostile as it may seemed to have been in the beginning, Sao Paulo was the city that embraced me,” Piloni says, noting that the Brazilian city has twenty-million inhabitants in its metropolitan area, making it the seventh-most populated city in the world. “It was in the middle of this multitude that I found the best people that I’ve met in my life. And I’m not talking about only the people that live here, but also the people that pass by. Sao Paulo is very cosmopolitan.” (Later, she adds this on the sense of place and her work: “The geographic position of where I will be located for this to happen is only a scenario. Art is what moves the artist.”)
The haunting from the missing face followed by deception—that is, the sculpture of a doll that comforts from nostalgia—has an immoral absence of affection.”
As Piloni has garnered attention for her sculptures—and later, video and photographic work in which her sculptures play “characters”—much has been made of the balance between the appealing and disturbing qualities of her work. There’s a deceptive aspect to some of the works, secrets revealed once a certain amount of time has been spent in the same room. An example: The Ilegais series features sculptures that represent dolls. At first, the pieces appear as they face the other direction. But as viewers walk around one of the sculptures to see her face, the reality of the piece comes into focus: It’s a tripod with hair on all sides. Piloni says that with all onlookers, from children to arts enthusiasts, the reaction is the same: “The haunting from the missing face followed by deception—that is, the sculpture of a doll that comforts from nostalgia—has an immoral absence of affection.”
…each finished work is another solved problem, the more experience gained, the more challenging the next work will be.”
Piloni likes to show bodies that couldn’t exist. Most are somehow manipulated or discombobulated, even when she breaks off to tackle the form of another animal entirely or create a false human-like interior of fruit. Yet, in crafting each figure in absorbing precision, a tension arises. It’s a pursuit that offers Piloni the chance to discuss eroticism, sexuality, identity, alienation, and other societal concepts. Even a perfectly poised “Ballerina,” upon further inspection, is a collection of boxed body parts, assembled just right for its performance. In each angle, the detached limbs and costume become both chilling and engrossing.
“When producing a sculpture, I have to guarantee that before anything else, the observer perceives that it is in space,” Piloni says. “Afterwards, I have to make the observer walk in the sculpture’s direction and around it. The longer I can capture the observer, the bigger the chances that my work will communicate to him. It is a survival struggle in a disproportionate disadvantage because she ‘stays,’ is static, placid, inanimate, dumb, and in principle doesn’t serve any purpose.”
The artist has worked in photography and video since 2011, and she does enjoy using her own sculptures as components of that work. But the trick of these formats is that Piloni can offer only what she wants the audience to see, stripping away the freedom of the viewer. And unlike the three-dimensional aspect of being in the presence of sculpture, there is no shared space between viewer and the photographic or cinematic art. Now, every angle isn’t primed for scrutiny. The artist moves between these mediums with ease, gaining new powers while ceding others in the process.
“Today when I look at my trajectory, I realize that regardless of the choices I made in the past, the artistic development process is very slow,” Piloni says. “It has to be this way. Even if the production is intense and incessant, each finished work is another solved problem. The more experience gained, the more challenging the next work will be and the more questions will arise because art never told me, ‘This is the answer.’ It only tells me, ‘This is the question.’”
Piloni says that the biggest lesson she’s learned in art was “to belong,” referring to the idea of knowing that artists (or, as she says, “weirdos like me”) have a place in the world. “I also learned to be less self-centered, which seems to be the nature of the artist class,” Piloni says. “I had the opportunity to interact with—get to know, to be helped by, and to help—many wonderful people that have contributed to my idea of what the world is, and that transpires in my work.*
This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose issue 42 which is sold out. Get our latest issue by subscribing to Hi-Fructose here.
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