This three piece sculpture is made by Quayola, a visual artist based in London. His work explores photography, geometry, time-based digital sculptures and immersive audiovisual installations and performances. He deconstructs architecture and historic artworks to then rebuild them. Factum Arte, in collaboration with Davide Quayola, has created a digital re-interpretation of a Laocoön, produced in resin with marble powder. Quayola investigates the paradigms of the old and the new, the real and the artificial. His artistic practice often explores how we look at original masterpieces and collections – particularly the tension that exists between primary experience and a mediated viewpoint. Crafting a peculiar distance from his subjects, Quayola engages visual analysis and geometry, often working across the platforms of audio-visual performance, drawing, photography and software programming. 

Captives is an ongoing series of digital and physical sculptures, a contemporary interpretation of Michelangelo’s unfinished series “Prigioni” (1513-1534) and his technique of “non-finito”.

The work explores the tension and equilibrium between form and matter, man-made objects of perfection and complex, chaotic forms of nature. Whilst referencing Renaissance sculptures, the focus of this series shifts from pure figurative representation to the articulation of matter itself. As in the original “Prigioni” the classic figures are left unfinished, documenting the very history of their creation and transformation.

Mathematical functions and processes describe computer-generated geological formations that evolve endlessly, morphing into classical figures. Industrial computer-controlled robots sculpt the resulting geometries into life-size “unfinished” sculptures.

“In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped, and perfect in attitude and action.
I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.
The best artist has that thought alone which is contained within the marble shell; the sculptor’s hand can only break the spell
to free the figures slumbering in the stone.
The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.”