Carole Feuerman. Fragments and figures on the threshold
By Helga Marsala
The story is well known. Carole Feuerman held her first exhibition in 1978 in Fort Worth, Texas, at the suggestion of a local merchant. Undoubtedly bold, the choice of theme clashed with an art system that, at some levels and in specific contexts, remained bound to an unspoken code of decorum and the dominant patriarchal culture, a system that was not always willing to welcome the wave of innovation that, during those years, was being driven by many artists and sectors of society championing female emancipation, sexual liberation and identity affirmation of younger generations. Deemed scandalous, incomprehensible and morally questionable, the works displayed were received with coldness and were immediately withdrawn from production. It was a painful setback, but one that would lead her to transform disillusionment into renewed creative impetus, turning personal trauma into an uninterrupted artistic evolution.
Her early works laid a solid foundation, with enduring elements that would go on to become the cornerstones of her later production: attention to sensory detail and the sensuality of surfaces, devotion to an idea of beauty that is not a comfortable escape or saccharine convention but a celebration of life, the harmonious resonance between subject and universe, as well as a connection with art history, poised between classical tradition and humanistic tension. Not to mention the relationship between forms, gestures, limbs, faces, masses and volumes, in pursuit of a dynamism of matter conceived both as a philosophical substance and as the magnetism of bodies and things. Finally, the aesthetic of the fragment and the unfinished would continually reappear in the years to come, never ceasing to interrogate the very logic and grammar of the forms themselves. This marked the challenging starting point from which a shift began to unfold — part transformation, part the emergence of a language all her own.
Her early sculptures were an homage to the concept of the fragment, in tune with the most daring and innovative explorations emerging at the time regarding the body, sexuality, affectivity, the relationship between intimate and public spaces and between the urges of the self and social frameworks. Designed to be displayed on the wall and observed frontally, as they protrude like high-reliefs or artefacts from an archaeology of the present, the works in this series in many cases serve as units of measure for a brazen eroticism, dismissed at the time as gratuitously scandalous by those who failed to grasp their cultural and introspective depth. Breasts, buttocks, hands, shoulders, groins, legs, angles of bodies in the act of grabbing onto each other, holding each other, desiring each other, touching and being touched: they are images that function as remnants or relics of an eros in motion, resurfaced from some obscure corner of personal memory, perhaps from a film snippet or the pages of an adult magazine, from fragments of personal fantasies and experiences or from the risqué iconography of Pop culture. Fragment by fragment, the resulting narrative unfolds through joyful close-ups, playing on the pruderies of a bourgeois audience — whether conservative or superficially emancipated — and offering the eye the very quintessence of erotic rapture and the art of seduction.
Clothing and accessories also play a part in these small compositions a patch of skin may coincide with a scrap of fabric and a pair of underwear, a button, a shoe, a belt, a tie, the edge of a lace trim, or a bra that becomes one with those partially exposed bodies. What remains hidden, unseen — beneath garments or beyond the torn fragment’s jagged edge — is matter caught between memory and imagination. In this play of cut-outs and sculptural articulation, in the fusion of fabric, flesh, image and gesture, a double aesthetic motion emerges: the object, the ornament, the fold, the garment, the accessory and the drapery become sensitive, living portions, blending with skin, while genuine nudity is objectified, slipping into an artificial, almost neutral, sensuality. The self vanishes in favour of a limb, a patch of skin, a strand of hair, a lip, a finger, each able to feel on its own, like sentient garments or things, to the point that this very sculptural concretion assumes the alluring and mysterious aura of a fetish. It is no coincidence that the faces — representations of identity and subjectivity — are deliberately excluded. Such a perspective prefigures what philosopher Mario Perniola would define twenty years later, through a stroke of insight, as the “sex appeal of the inorganic,” radicalising the theme and giving it contemporary relevance. The body becomes objectified, while garments and objects serve as extensions of a pleasure that is no longer conventionally sensual and spiritual, but virtual, uninterrupted, unlimited, expanded and devoid of gender and all other distinctions.
Roots, contexts: from Pop to the feminist avant-garde
Trained and educated in the 1960s, Feuerman absorbed and internalised the revolutionary climate of Pop Art from an early age — an inheritance that would remain the solid root of all her work. Coming from the worlds of illustration, graphic design, musical entertainment, and communication — fields she entered professionally at a very young age — and in deep alignment with the legacy of Warhol, she absorbed from Pop Art the urgency of an unfiltered, direct engagement with reality, marked by constant immersions in images drawn from everyday life and popular culture. Equally significant is her preference for seriality, evident both in the repetition of themes and subjects and in the use of casts as tools for the immediate and potentially infinite reproduction of the real.
While an essential legacy, Feuerman was quick to transform and reshape it in response to new creative urgencies. The cultural climate in the 1970s had already begun to shift in shape: the dominance of Pop had given way to new modes of expression, from Hyperrealism to explorations of the body, from performance art to body art, and from experimental cinema to the so-called “feminist avant-garde.”
It is therefore indisputable that the significance of the work produced at the outset of her career must be understood within the broader context of those widespread, transversal shifts propelled by a host of artists and intellectuals. Artists such as Vito Acconci, Gina Pane, Marina Abramović and Ulay or Ana Mendieta, to name but a few, had for some years begun to foster — albeit through differing modes and nuances — a productive convergence between the organic, political, philosophical and psychological dimensions of identity. The body became a battleground and a site of reclamation, a place of extreme visibility of the self and, at the same time, its mystery, its refuge and its inexhaustible enigma. It was a body that, driven by the imaginative force of art, could be explored, liberated, and reinscribed with symbolic meaning, and probed in its instinctual depths and then tested as a porous surface, infinitely receptive and self-aware. It was a body exposed to others, to chance, to risk — beyond the very limits of pleasure, pain, modesty and fear. This extraordinary cultural milieu, together with broader socio-political activism and cultural phenomena, gradually redefined the nature of the single/community dyad and the scope of the public role of the artist and intellectual. At the heart of an emerging and explosive postmodernity, new forms of languages, aesthetics and the grammar of communication and artistic/literary discourse were taking shape.
When it came to the “feminist avant-garde,” the movement’s hard-earned and delayed recognition as an artistic current in its own right — that is, an autonomous and defined phenomenon of contemporary artistic expression — is largely due to the work of critic Lawrence Alloway, who laid the theoretical foundations of Pop Art, introducing the term in 1957, and was deeply committed to advocating for women artists’ rights during the 1970s. His essay, Women’s Art in the ’70s, published in the magazine Art in America (vol. 64, May/June 1976), generated an important debate and reframed the question in new terms. A staunch critic of the sexism that dominated cultural institutions and the practices of the art world, Alloway defined the boundaries of a movement grounded in feminist and female-centred research committed to revitalising artistic language, embracing innovative technological tools and conquering aesthetic and iconographic territories far removed from tradition. The themes of the body, gender identity, sexuality and the dynamics of power and prescribed roles became subjects of critical inquiry, aimed at subverting both artistic forms and their underlying content. Women artists came together in collectives and cooperatives, while the “separatist” exhibitions, from which men were excluded, were the necessary response to a clear imbalance, in addition to a means to critically define the emerging scene. The ultimate and parallel goal, however, was to bring about change in social forms and mainstream culture, hence the “avant-garde” nature of a movement that was intrinsically political and that Alloway traced back to the progressive, utopian, revolutionary and futurist spirit that defines the very essence of the historical avant-gardes. While Carole Feuerman was not among the central figures of that experience, she indisputably absorbed its anxieties, inspirations, theories and radical innovations.
Women, experimental cinema and sculpture: a possible dialogue
Among the many figures who made a decisive contribution to the movements emerging during the 1960s and 1970s, certain women artists from the American experimental cinema scene stand out as especially significant from a comparative, historical-critical perspective. For many of these women artists and filmmakers, sexuality played a crucial role in their emancipation from patriarchal control and the stifling constraints of bourgeois conservatism. The sphere of cinematic narrative became the site where the very essence of life — namely, the body, pleasure, affective, erotic and homosexual relationships — was explored, in resonance with the upheavals of the historical avant-gardes, modernism and postmodernism. Reality, raw and bare, became the prime material for a compelling and disruptive aesthetic transposition, breaking taboos and linguistic conventions. This climate recalls Feuerman’s methodological stance in her early experiments: the immateriality of cinema and the tangible weight of sculpture mirror each other, allowing kindred sensibilities to surface, shaped by a shared cultural context.
We need only think of the work of Anne Severson, who, by employing shock strategies and subverting conventional representations of the female body, embraced the struggle against the lingering remnants of widespread puritanism in the 1970s, still legitimised by mechanisms of public control. For example, the famous Hays Office — a stringent code of self-censorship adopted by the American film industry to avert government intervention — remained in force until 1968. At the time, masculinity and femininity were territories to be reclaimed. This meant dismantling the sugar-coated ideals of beauty, virility and seduction pushed by the capitalist industry, as well as the modesty and moralism encouraged by politics. Mainstream cinema largely upheld these models, often at the cost of portraying bodies in their natural, truthful form. On the opposite front stood pornography, the forbidden counterpart to the most uncompromising bigotry, with its turn toward commercialism and masculinism, also brimming with stereotypes.
In the seven minutes of Riverbody (1970), for example, Severson shows a sequence of 87 nude men and women, images extracted from reality and blurred into each other within an uninterrupted temporality, accompanied by the sound of flowing water. It was an intriguing convergence with the themes that characterised the initial works of Feuerman: the body, nudity and water.
It was with Near the Big Chakra (1971) that the American artist and director would go straight to the heart of the hypocrisy of the media and narrative system. In the span of 17 minutes, the film brings together the vaginas of thirty-seven women ranging from three months to fifty-six years old, all featured in extreme close-ups. No longer an instrument of male pleasure, cheap eroticism or the fashion and beauty industries, the body contracts into a single fragment — one that is normally denied to the gaze, but here laid bare and magnified, stripped of all aesthetic embellishment, with details of sperm, tampons, infections and muscular contractions. Such radicality is not found in Feuerman’s early works, in which the relationship between visible and invisible, and between sensuality and sexuality, unfolds in subtle and nuanced ways. However, a common thread that runs through their work is the rendering — on screen or in sculptural material — of the rougher, more brazen texture of reality, challenging the clichés of a controlling and repressive bourgeois sugarcoating, especially in relation to women. Even more interesting is the examination of a similar compositional approach, centred on the fragmentation of a headless body: while Severson isolates dozens of vulvae, forgoing faces, contexts, and bodily unity, Feuerman dismembers the body itself, presenting torn and isolated fragments, akin to vertiginous close-ups.
The fresh wind of female-driven research was blowing ever more decisively, as irreverent and provocative practices came to light, capable of dismantling and rethinking artistic and cultural models. In 1974, Barbara Hammer, a pioneer of lesbian and feminist experimental cinema, presented her Dyketactics — four minutes of erotic contact between female bodies in nature, in a play of fusions, sutures, and overlays between segments of wide shots and close-up details. A correspondence between sight and touch constitutes the film’s aesthetic style — or better yet, its synesthetic and kinaesthetic signature — with an ending style that fluidly stimulates the viewer’s sensory (not merely intellectual) response. This is precisely what Carole Feuerman was doing in those same years, only through sculpture: the sculptural fragments operate through intersections and grafts, dissolving bodies into bodies, gestures into gestures, evoking in the viewer the memory of tactile and sensual experiences.
A similar path was taken a few years prior by Carolee Schneemann with her Fuses, shot between 1964 and 1967. An experimental artist in the field of painting, Happenings, kinetic theatre and video, Fuses marked Schneemann’s first encounter with a complex cinematographic project. The objective? To convey the essence of a romantic relationship through the staging of the obscene — that is, by filming the naturalness of an erotic encounter. It is the story of her and her partner, a man with whom she shared a decade of life in a relationship of harmony and complete equality. The sexual encounter is observed from the imagined viewpoint of their cat in an immersive, nearly abstract montage, visually transfigured with painterly force yet never shying away from the raw truth of each detail. The work’s commanding sensuality, the correspondence between its carnal dimension and the handcrafted manipulation of film — painted, burned, cut, corroded — as well as the urge to take the viewer beyond the boundaries of conventional art and common morality, resonate profoundly in Feuerman’s oeuvre, particularly in her sculptures from the 1970s.
From eros to water
Amid such a climate, the glacial reception of her first exhibition placed Carole Feuerman at a crossroads: having already given up a promising career in graphic design and poured her intellectual and emotional energy into the pursuit of art, it was time to find a way forward. One that would allow her to remain herself, and at the same time navigate the resistance of a world not quite ready for such bold steps, still reluctant to welcome certain daring breakthroughs. Her examination of the human figure and of reality carried on, infused with the legacy of Pop and its enduring notion of seriality; eroticism, however, was put on hold, at least in its most overt form.
In a conversation with art critic Eleanor Munro, the artist recalls: “I decided if the world wasn’t ready for my erotic pieces, I’d take the least erotic subject I could think of, namely sports […]. I visualised a swimmer coming out of the water. With goggles, hair slicked back, water drops on her skin. I saw her step out of herself and come into a new reality. Then I figured out how to do it. And I did the first swimmer.”1
It was in 1978 that one of her most celebrated and renowned works, Catalina, was born, a resin sculpture delicately painted by hand, like the previous series of body fragments. The impact of those works, once contested in Texas, remained strong, but the subject changed, along with its subversive force. Feuerman has often described that sudden epiphany: a vision presented itself, activating two opposing trajectories in time. On one hand, there were her childhood memories, Long Island, the intense blue of the Pacific Ocean, Jones Beach and the vast stretches of light sand; on the other hand, her future, a line that began to define itself, an image appearing where something else had momentarily receded. A woman emerged from the water, athletic, proud, aware, immersed in the stillness of the sun and the sea, her amber skin traced by fine beads of water, like sparkling microcrystals. It marked a new beginning and the inspiration that would nourish her on her path forward.
Catalina was the trait d’union among those erotic body fragments and the extensive series of swimmers executed from there onward, with infinite variations of the theme. She was not yet a complete figure, but a full-scale bust in the round, conceived as a body projecting from the path traced by the fluid anatomy of earlier works. A fragment herself, Catalina is rendered with striking realistic precision. Emerging from the whiteness of the wall, the work preserves traces of its original sensuality, a singular reflection of it: the closed eyes, the ecstatic expression, the smooth body enveloped in a fiery red swimsuit, and a pattern of translucent droplets, rendered with the finest brushwork and astonishing verisimilitude, evoking in the viewer a sense of extreme tactility. Once again, touch and gaze move in unison, oscillating between a mimetic rendering of reality and its emotional reinvention.
Swimmers, dancers, everyday women
Over the course of her career, Feuerman created a myriad of swimmers, dancers, athletes and everyday women — almost always full-bodied — turning to male subjects only on rare occasions. Youth, harmony and grace would continue to guide the development of these meticulous representations. Meanwhile, the trend toward meticulousness and realism, which had emerged in America in the 1970s, was steadily asserting itself with growing success.
Carole Feuerman, a Hyperrealist? This has long been a misconception in the reception of her work and in interpretations by some critics, fostering misleading associations with key figures of American Hyperrealism — most notably John De Andrea and Duane Hanson, both older than Feuerman (Hanson by two decades) — who pioneered a visual language that emerged as both an extension and a radicalisation of Pop Art. Resin, fibreglass, and coloured PVC came to displace the tradition of bronze and marble, as the notion of ideal, symbolic, celebratory, and lyrical figuration gradually gave way to a precise and obsessive replication of everyday reality, examined down to its anthropological and social folds. Thus, the complete overlap between the human subject and its artificial replica was established.
Hyperrealism continued to rigorously adhere to life-size proportions and a meticulous focus on detail — from the patterns of fabric, wrinkles on faces, strands of hair and poses to the solidity of a ball and the facial expressions — to the point of touching the very edge of perceptual and psychological limits that Freud defined as “the uncanny”:2 the perfect double, at once familiar and foreign, challenges the eye, sows doubt and instils a feeling of eerie mistrust and disorienting anxiety.
Feuerman has never considered herself a Hyperrealist — despite the points of contact with the artistic trajectories, from the influence of Pop to the detailed rendering of realistic or real individuals — and with good reason. We need only think of the theme of scale, often shifted from life-size to monumental dimensions, in a clear disregard for illusionistic effects or strategies of visual deception. Immune to the rivalry of Zeuxis and Parrhasius, Feuerman has always sought to emphasise the dividing line between sculpture and a human in flesh and blood, despite her skilled art of imitation. Significant in this respect is her use of plinths and supports, employed naturally and without emphasis, yet deliberately avoiding any attempt to blend her subjects within their surrounding contexts. Equally telling is her recurring engagement with the themes of fragmentation and incompleteness: rather than limiting herself to full figures, she often explores busts, truncated torsos — sometimes rendered in monochrome — occasionally even flirting with the formless and the abstract, such as in her Dripped Bronze. In certain works, she creates hyper-detailed half-figures emerging from rough blocks of matter, echoing Michelangelo’s celebrated non-finito works. The artist once explained to Eleanor Munro: “Hanson worked with everyday people. His interest was to capture exactly what they are. But I’m not doing that. I’m working more in the classic tradition: creating something that isn’t. It is either more or less beautiful than reality. After all, beauty lies in the mind.”3
Ultimately, as poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “beauty is always an addition, and we don’t know to what.”4 For the same reasons, references to tradition, art history, classical antiquity, and archaeology go beyond certain titles and underlying allusions, and become a true reservoir of iconographies to be reinterpreted and reworked, as thoroughly examined by Demetrio Paparoni:5 Rodin, Ingres, Canova, Degas’ dancers, the bathing Venus motif, Leda and the swan, the Naiads and the Nereids and Bernini’s Apollo and Dafne, with that iconic hand sunk into the fleshy marble with ravishing verisimilitude. Above all, from a theoretical perspective, it constitutes a vital historical counterpoint, a mnemonic layer in which to dissolve the commanding voice of the present and the vivid imprint of reality. Hence the impulse to muddy the waters, to mix, to venture into that ambiguous sense of time that belongs to today, to tomorrow, and to what has already occurred, so that it might happen again.
“I like the idea,” she once stated, “that my figures encourage the viewer to look closely at what stands before them. I want the viewer to complete the story.”6 Feuerman is not only referring to her erotic sculptures of the 1970s, in which the violence of the tear reduces the complete figure to mere latency; indeed, her entire body of work encourages the viewer to engage in a personal rewriting, a free identification that fills in the gaps and resolves the underlying ambiguity.
Even on the rare occasion that a social element makes its way into her work, Feuerman uses it as a springboard for a new artistic project, yet she remains far removed from any form of verism. The political asylum granted to Cuban citizens beginning in the 1960s, under Fidel Castro’s regime, struck the artist through a violent vision: thousands of “balseros, driven by poverty and forced into clandestinity, embarked on long sea voyages aboard makeshift rafts, built from truck tyres and wooden planks (balsa in Cuban Spanish meaning ‘raft’). They risked death to reach Florida, situated 145 kilometres away from their island”.
Feuerman, who lived in Key West, Florida, between the late 1970s and 1980s, retained those images, which settled in the depths of her vision and emotional core. In 1981, she created EN 2-0278, a wall fragment that reflects a decisive shift: from the theme of eros to that of immigration tragedies, portrayed through two hands that grasp onto a black inner tube. The body becomes a wreckage, quite literally, in the midst of a shipwreck. It is an eloquent “sketch” that suggests without fully revealing, like a decontextualised detail charged with drama. In 1984, Innertube was conceived, a powerful vision that would be replicated for over a decade in different versions. No longer only the arms, there is now a face frozen in expressions of slight tension and melancholy. They are young swimmers with white swim caps, suspended in nothingness, clutching to that piece of coarse rubber, as one clings to a dream, a hope or the next mirage. The delicate features and cascades of glassy droplets are rendered with moving realism, but the narrative dissolves — alongside the submerged body — once again preventing the identification of both theme and context. What remains is the sweetness of the traits, the closed eyes, the dreamlike surrender veiled in sadness and the contrast between the loosely defined figure and the odd dark float that resembles an inner tube.
In 2013, Innertube Variant II was created, which, in subsequent years, would be converted into a monumental scale, taking the name of Survival of Serena. The iconography remained the same, with women clutching their innertubes, sometimes black, often colourful, like beach inflatables. Their faces now appear serene, relaxed, in the bliss of a pleasant voyage. Yet, for Feuerman, they are, and remain, “survivors.” When describing Catalina, she once stated: “She appears as a proud survivor, beautiful, and strong […]. I love the mechanics of water and its presence as an enduring symbol of life. The symbolism of water is far-reaching and profoundly deep. Water cleanses and purifies. Water touches all people; Water connects one land to another. Water moistens and revives. I sculpt swimmers because we are all swimmers.” 7 Grounded in reality, the image is nonetheless shrouded in a magic that suspends space, meaning and narrative, drifting toward other shores and unknown fates.
Notes for magic superrealism
The rejection of the definition of “Hyperrealist” and the adoption of the term “Pop Superrealist” was a choice that repositioned Feuerman’s oeuvre in relation to the question of reality and its translation into image. By letting go of the prefix “hyper,” the emphasis on extreme realism diminishes, along with the desire to create sculptures that are more real than reality itself. But what does the particle “super” mean? The term “Superrealism,” which appeared in the 1920s (in the title of the Azorín’s most experimental novel, published in 1929, for instance), is often used as a variant of “Surrealism,” a word introduced by Apollinaire in 1917 and employed several years later to name one of the most fascinating artistic and literary movements of the previous century. In many respects, the meaning moves toward an alternate, expanded reality — one that transcends the objective and logical framework we usually depend on. With varied and shifted nuances, an idea of “surpassing” emerges, marked by experiences of immersion into the unconscious, the mysteries of the spirit and the landscape of the mind.
But how might an artist born in the tradition of Pop Art, and dedicated to the reproduction of reality — even through life casts and painterly refinements — look toward similar horizons? Feuerman admired Surrealism, even exploring its outer limits at a young age, but ultimately embarked on a different path. And yet, that subtle imbalance we mentioned — that spatial and temporal shift that casts her sculptures in an intimate, rarefied, and gently dissonant light — that emotional vibration that emanates from her faces, gestures and sensual bodies, and, finally, those formal choices (from fragmentation to upscaling, from the use of pedestals to the unfinished), all become the driving force behind a quiet slide into the realm of the possible, where every realistic subject is transformed into a poetic object. Rooted in the hic et nunc, yet never conflated with it, her figures are splendid incarnations of an unending inquiry that problematizes the theme of verisimilitude and the relationship between image and thing, between representation and referent.
At the heart of this unresolved tension lies an alternative (yet somehow adjacent) definition that offers a possible resolution to the terms “Surrealism” and “Superrealism”, that of “Magic Realism,” which might be refashioned ad hoc using the original phrase “Magic Superrealism.” A phenomenon attributable to the German context, associated with the painters of the classical New Objectivity movement (a term introduced for the first time in 1925 by critic Franz Roh), and present also in South America as a literary movement that later took off internationally, Magic Realism enjoyed particular success in Italy, thanks to prominent artists and writers who recognized its intellectual and creative drive or helped shape its definition. What united them, in the season of the “return to order” — following the upheaval of the historical Avant-Gardes, during a period when there was an attempt to emerge from the anxieties and ruins of the Great War — was a renewed commitment to reality, mediated by the aftermath of avant-garde turbulence and filtered through an underlying sense of disorientation and an ineffable enchantment. It thus happened that the crystalline, rounded and austere form of a world depicted with obsessive attention to detail—frozen in its perfection—spilt over into a kind of magic that was neither fantasy nor the depth of dreams, but rather a subtle reverie, almost indistinguishable from reality itself.
Something of those exemplary works seems to unconsciously resurface in certain sculptures by Feuerman: a comparative exercise that offers useful interpretative tools. The same faint mystery, the same classicism evoked and at the same time contradicted by the fury of linguistic innovations she experienced and absorbed firsthand. The same precision, exactness and truth, diluted in the clear waters of brief contemporary fables. Thus, in the American artist’s infinite visual gallery, the living space of each figure is a space of stillness and emotion, while the time of the sculpture lingers in the glow of an eternal new beginning, on the threshold where what is and what was cease to be distinct.
The magic of the fragment
Feuerman’s works from the 1970s are a story unto themselves. The suspended atmospheres we have come to associate with “Magic Realism” — the dreaming faces, the graceful and light limbs, caressed by water or by the sun — would come later. But the enchantment was already there, despite being attuned to different frequencies: wild, restless, brimming with pathos, bursting with memory, and futuristic, like an underground breakthrough.
The theme of the fragmented, desiring body — central to the series of works from the 1970s — resonates with the dynamics of postmodernism, drawing on echoes of archaeology and 19th-century experimentation, while also invoking philosophical and psychoanalytic reflections on the concept of eros and its inextricable connection with death. The erotic or aesthetic fusion of bodies — shreds, portions, limbs and molecules — is a marvel that reanimates and reconfigures them, a kind of magic that moves from the order of singularities to the scandal of interpenetration. This brings to mind the extraordinary intellectual adventure of Georges Bataille, a philosopher who was aligned with Surrealism in a dissident, mystical, raw and radical way. He engaged with the themes of the body, eroticism, fragments and formlessness through his seminal writings, experimenting alongside artists, poets and photographers (among them Jacques-André Boiffard and his powerful photographs of fragments of flesh).
As for sculpture, the concept of the fragment — with its irregular and rough edges — is a tear, a wound caused by separation, the power of the unfinished (where an image is absent, inventiveness and memory ignite), but also a kind of magic of grafting and fusion, between the hypothesis of reconstruction (as in archaeological practice) and free combinations of elements. Eroticism as a sculptural exercise, and vice versa. Auguste Rodin remains a significant and essential reference within this sphere. Feuerman’s admiration for the great French sculptor reaches beyond the mere citation of a single sculpture. It inevitably points back to a specific aspect of his oeuvre, appreciated only later — between the 1960s and the 1980s of the previous century8 — considered today to be among the most interesting manifestations of his genius. Beginning in 1895, the year in which he moved to Meudon, as masterfully recounted by Rilke in his essay on the artist from 1903, Rodin began to collect plaster casts of arms, hands, legs, feet and heads of different sizes, which he would reutilise for works in marble or bronze based on different combinations. These were attempts made during preliminary phases of work or discarded remnants: from them arose experimental assemblages of extraordinary interest, both for the resulting forms (which could include unfinished portions), and for the unusual process involved.
While reasoning in terms of fragments and remnants proved difficult for the 19th-century mind, unaccustomed to even considering casts as completed works, the 20th century would witness a reversal of perspective: with the miraculous emergence of photography, and later cinema and television, the mechanism of the gaze would be compelled to operate through details, close-ups, fragments, montages, magnifications and rapid, dynamic juxtapositions. Technology would definitively overturn the primacy of visual unity, reaching, in postmodernity, the radical affirmation of an aesthetics of fragmentation, relativity, and recombination, along a circular — rather than progressive — trajectory of history.
Thresholds, waves
From the dimension of eros to that of water, the body — whether whole or fragmented — remains the common principle throughout. It is a journey through complex symbolic universes, in the name of uninterrupted movement, transformation, fusion and dissolution, once again retrieving images and ideas that were once central to the Surrealists, Superrealists, and members of Magic Realism. Thus, water — a key element in Feuerman’s imagery — is a timeless archetype, an impossible measure of time itself, an infinite opening, a submerged kaleidoscope and dreamlike substance, a Heraclitean flow and perpetual mutability, amniotic fluid, nourishment, abandonment, and death; the athlete’s struggle, storm and sweetness, battle, and survival. The vast range of possibilities unlocked by the relationship with water takes shape in the dual poles of the fantastic and the real, of surface and depth, between those who navigate by daylight, tracing clear routes, and those who dive into a magical, dreamlike underworld.9
In this flow of images, suspended between reality and introspection, Feuerman continues to accumulate fragments and figures along the threshold, a shoreline caressed by the sea, a break in the horizon, a life-preserving device in times of shipwreck, a transition of state between natural elements, a point of fusion in the embrace of bodies; and, simultaneously, the wound of rupture, the edge of the fragment, a new blossoming. The enchantment of the threshold becomes both a magical formula and the line traced by the eyelashes at the edge of a closed eyelid, a liminal terrain where the truth of the flesh blends with the lucid light of thought and imagination.
1 - Eleanor Munro, “The sculpture of Carole A. Feuerman”, in D. Merriam, E. Munro, D. Finn, Carole Feuerman: Sculpture, Hudson Hills Press, New York, 1999, p. XX.
2 - Translated into Italian as “Il Perturbante” and into English as “The Uncanny,” the term “Das Unheimliche”, as defined by Sigmund Freud, was explored in his 1919 essay of the same name. It is the opposite of the German word heimlich, which carries a double meaning: on the one hand, it suggests familiarity, that which is known, reassuring, domestic; on the other hand, it implies something so familiar that it becomes secret, hidden, occult. Unheimlich is therefore the contrary of the first meaning, but not of the second, whereby it refers to something familiar that has undergone repression and, therefore, becomes foreign and unsettling. The idea of the double of reality (as a simulacrum, mannequin, reflection, mask or hyperrealistic representation) perfectly embodies this contrasting and sinister sentiment in the artistic, theatrical and literary realms.
3 - Munro, cit., p. XX.
4 - Rainer Maria Rilke, Su Rodin, (edited by) Elisabetta Potthoff, Abscondita, Milano, 2009, p. 64 [1903].
5 - Demetrio Paparoni, “Carole A. Feuerman: Pop Superrealism”, in D. Paparoni, Feuerman: Superrealist Sculptures, Rizzoli, New York, 2024.
6 - Munro, cit., p. XX.
7 - Rising Stars: Meet Carole Feuerman, Voyagebaltimore.com, 2024
8 - Between her years of training and her first successes as an artist (with her erotic pieces and, later, fragments of hands, dancers’ feet on pointe, buttocks settled on bicycle seats, female nude torsos), Feuerman certainly had the opportunity to discover and explore this aspect of Rodin’s research, which had suddenly become of great interest to critics and the public. Her assemblages began to garner discussion thanks to the exhibition Rodin inconnu, presented at the Louvre in 1962-1963, whereas a more scientific reconstruction did not come until 1981-1982 with Rodin Rediscovered, organised by the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The theme was later revisited more extensively, through the comparison of various artists, eras and iconographies, with the exhibition Le Corps en morceaux, at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt between 1990 and 1991.
9 - In his L'Eau et les rêves (1942), through a selection of anthological excerpts from various authors, Gaston Bachelard thoroughly examined the multiple meanings historically associated with the aquatic element, in a poetic, psychoanalytical, mythological and anthropological sense. Many pages were dedicated to the visual dimension of water, an inexhaustible reservoir of literary, pictorial, and sculptural images.