Agnes Vitani, Finger traps, Hors d’œuvre, 2021

Construction gloves, cement sprues, metal, cotton, 31 x 38 x 35 cm

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The work of Agnes Vitani, stemming from the pictorial practice established a symbiosis between the real and the abstraction according to a principle of overflow and contamination.

Gathering, gleaning, whether real or through photos, videos, of all these small things of the order of the banal feed his work. His imaginary museum includes Agnès Varda’s film Les glaneurs, Alain Cavalier’s Petits portraits, Arte Povera, Philip Guston’s works and those of Liz Magor.

The Finger Traps present dressed hands, adorned, and play with us… Gloves are a recurrent and quite frequent part of the urban trophies, mismatched gloves for the most part, work gloves (garbage collectors, construction site gloves), sport gloves (motorcycle or bicycle), leather gloves…

“It started when I wanted to photograph The inking of my hands due to the handling of felts in the workshop, this newspaper gave Encoloradas. I have used in counterweight of certain sculptures of the vinyl gloves testifying also of this work the knotweeds and the zombies “.

The Finger Traps are made of gloves worn and lost by strangers, they keep the marks. Some traps are built from donated gloves because they are impossible to sell, they are imported and look like insect legs. The second life of these small things has summoned an imaginary world ranging from the plant register to the animal and human register, the assembly of these small sculptures recalls the rhizomes, leather plays the bronze, the association of fragments of bitumen, cement cores and vestiges of rockery evokes the urban landscape and its multiple layers, but all this has sometimes strangely with the air of a marine world. Some will see some echoes with the absurd and poetic universe of the surrealists…

Richard Brautigan in “ Notebook of a Return from Troy” begins with a reference to a shoe in the middle of a lonely Honolulu intersection… Almost haunting… Whose story remained forever unknown…” “Under the auspices of this auspicious beginning, I will continue to describe the journey of someone…”.