Erma dell'arma

‘I began my adventure working with a precarious art form, but ultimately arrived at a tangible one that could be conserved … I think it’s interesting to rediscover a way of working that’s not academic, not obvious, not consumerist, and even within a great tradition’

- Luigi Ontani



The mercurial Italian artist Luigi Ontani brings together classical, baroque and kitsch aesthetics in a postmodern project that revolves around his own inscrutable image. Although he works in photography, drawing and performance, polychrome ceramics form perhaps the most vital part of his practice. These sophisticated, slickly produced works allow him to echo and inflect the various decorative and artistic traditions of his country with a camp, colourful and Koonsian edge. ERMA Dell’Arma is a life-size ceramic statue bearing, as usual, the artist’s face: he is transformed into a columnar figure wearing the ceremonial dress of the Carabinieri, the Italian military police. He sports a navy uniform with red trim, a white sash and epaulettes, and a bicorn officer’s hat bearing a red and blue ostrich-feather plume. A buttoned ankle-boot – a style which Ontani himself is fond of wearing, and of which he has made standalone sculptures – emerges from the statue’s front, poised to crush a cowering angel on the gleaming gold plinth below.

This work is from Ontani’s series of ErmEstEtetiche, whose title is a play on the Italian words for ‘herm’ and ‘aesthetic’. A herm is a sculptural form that originated in Ancient Greece and was adopted by the Romans. It features a head, and sometimes a torso, above a plain, squared-off lower section, sometimes with male genitals carved at the appropriate height. The herms of Ancient Greece originally depicted the phallic god Hermes, and were placed at crossings, borders and boundaries as a protection against evil. In later Roman and Renaissance versions, the form was used for portrait busts of famous public figures like Socrates and Plato. Ontani draws on this tradition in the ErmEstEtetiche, which include colourful herm interpretations of Christopher Columbus, Pythagoras, Nietzsche, Saint Sebastian and other historical and mythical characters. Made in collaboration with the Bottega d’Arte Ceramica Gatti in Faenza (a firm which itself had important relationships with artists such as Gio Ponti and Giacomo Balla), they are alluringly perfect in workmanship, and utterly captivating in the ‘aesthetic’ sense pointed up by the series’ title. Beyond this immediate beauty, however, Ontani weaves together a deliberate array of specific cultural and intellectual references. Erma Dell’Arma is a charming presence, but also somewhat surreal and enigmatic. He seems at once toy solider and military monument, a whimsical mannequin and a god to be worshipped. The threatened angel trembles beneath his authority. Ontani's impassive face and gleaming, stylish surface reveal nothing, creating a work of captivating and uneasy beauty.