Salome
Ian Charles Lepine seeks to present beings trapped in a crossroads of contradiction: his interest is to display creatures whose very existence negates their very existence. These are beings at war with themselves, a war where all victories cannot but prove pyrrhic.
His sculptures are frequently complemented by a poem in either English, French, or Italian, that seeks to give a voice to its inert matter.
Author: Ian Charles Lepine
Year: 2022
Title: Salome
Technique: Ceramic clay sculpture, painted with oxides and enamel.
Salome is a biblical character in the court of Herod Antipas. This monarch promised to grant her a boon if she danced for him the dance of the Seven Veils. Urged by her mother, Herodias, Salome asks as a reward the head of John the Baptist.
This piece reinterprets the myth and collapses time, showing the unintended consequences of her actions: Salome presents her own head. Fortuna’s wheel has turned, the mighty have become the deposed, and history beheads its tyrants when it is not too busy punishing the innocent.
Salome
How blind we grope along the labyrinth
Of history, unwise as if our actions
Might someday stir the future’s violent passions
Or be condemned upon the plinth
Of inhumanity as blackest vice.
And so indeed, we live upon enjambment,
Mistrusting each next line, and each event,
In the event we’re shown to be unwise
And to have been the architects of fate.
By asking for his head, I pleased my God,
My mother, king, and country but instead
It seems that I unleashed the future’s hate.
But how was I to know when fate is veiled?
I still perhaps was right. Await the end.
–Bologna, Italia
24 October MMXXII