Si On / Pearl Necklace on Pig’s Neck

These paintings are the memoir of a painful death experienced in adolescence and the mature acceptance of mortality that verges on macabre and joy. Si On’s monumental works recount a personal loss of faith in inner harmony, while also prophesying the collapse of an entire civilization.

The exhibition’s architectural reference draws on the Baroque designs of piazzas: Rome’s Quattro Fontane and Palermo’s Quattro Canti (Piazza Vigliena). Si On’s eclectic, exuberant, and three-dimensional works form four similar façades, turned toward one another and toward the viewer – a passerby who, just like in Rome and Palermo, attempts to decipher the symbols on the surfaces and take in all four at once. This is an impossible task at the site of the original piazzas, where the crowds, street noise, and sun, ever more scorching each year provoke headaches and claustrophobic panic attacks.

In the Palermo square, the rhythm of the four façades is provided by statues of four Spanish kings of Sicily and four statues of the city’s female patron saints. In Si On’s version, they are replaced by anti-heroines fashioned from fragments of the artist’s old clothes, jewelry, and personal belongings. Their story continues in the sculptural self-portraits from the Born in a Void series. The symbolic starting point – the point on the circle where the narrative begins – is the work The Most Hated Girl, a deeply personal return to early youth and the painful experience of total rejection and disillusionment with adolescence. A crushed “good” girl, with a figurine of the Virgin Mary in place of a brain and a doily imitating a Baroque ruff, enters into a dialogue with another sculpture by Si On – a maid. Their dreams of agency have never come true.

As we move along the other façades, we encounter further incarnations of the artist. The work that appears to close the cycle is the painting I Do Not Believe in Humans. Similar to Double Sun, it condemns the sins of the Anthropocene and ecological ignorance, and foretells a shared downfall for humankind. The anti-heroine wears a superhero cape – devoured by insects; a Baroque symbol of decay and corruption. Regardless of whether we were happy or our dreams ever came true, we all face a similar struggle for survival at the end of life. In this context, the exhibition’s title, Pearl Necklace on Pig’s Neck, becomes starkly clear. The pearls are nature, the swine are us – humans, with our unethical, ecologically destructive games and diversions.