

November, 2023. Text by Matteo Luca, Forli (Italy), Photo: Matteo Luca
My artistic work on bread arises from the question: how can I be nourishment for the other? This brought me to the earth, to bread, and to human. In several reasons it led me towards a symbolic and archetypal origin linked to materials, meanings, and different reflections on the human being. Bread and the body have always had a close connections between them. To using bread for representing the human figure is for me a way of telling the human being through what bread means. Bread accompanies us in daily life, in popular stories, in traditions and cultures, in politics, in war and in peace; up to the spiritual and symbolic aspects of life and death, of sharing and welcoming. it is a way of thinking about the human being and also of staging a gesture of love that is expressed in being nourishment for the other, in giving oneself as food for the soul.





In the practice, I made the cast of my body (and that of a woman) in terracotta, and inside I bake the bread in a wood-burning oven that I built for this purpose. during cooking I never master what happens, and I let the fire and the dough with the yeast generates the shape. where the bread is contained in the mold, it takes the form of the body, otherwise it grows freely. the works that are created are always different with parts well cooked and others burned. this, leads me to think about the complexity of who we are. how, as much as we can give our love-nourishment, we always carry our shadows with us, the inedible parts of ourselves. there is a uninterrupted dialogue through light and dark, happynes and sadnes, life and death. I can feel I touch a truth in that.

November, 2023. Text by Matteo Luca, Forli (Italy).
Photo: Matteo Luca
My artistic work on bread arises from the question: how can I be nourishment for the other? This brought me to the earth, to bread, and to human. In several reasons it led me towards a symbolic and archetypal origin linked to materials, meanings, and different reflections on the human being. Bread and the body have always had a close connections between them. To using bread for representing the human figure is for me a way of telling the human being through what bread means. Bread accompanies us in daily life, in popular stories, in traditions and cultures, in politics, in war and in peace; up to the spiritual and symbolic aspects of life and death, of sharing and welcoming. it is a way of thinking about the human being and also of staging a gesture of love that is expressed in being nourishment for the other, in giving oneself as food for the soul.





In the practice, I made the cast of my body (and that of a woman) in terracotta, and inside I bake the bread in a wood-burning oven that I built for this purpose. during cooking I never master what happens, and I let the fire and the dough with the yeast generates the shape. where the bread is contained in the mold, it takes the form of the body, otherwise it grows freely. the works that are created are always different with parts well cooked and others burned. this, leads me to think about the complexity of who we are. how, as much as we can give our love-nourishment, we always carry our shadows with us, the inedible parts of ourselves. there is a uninterrupted dialogue through light and dark, happynes and sadnes, life and death. I can feel I touch a truth in that.