RAPTURE

In Rapture, an adolescent figure is engulfed by a crowd dressed in Baroque garments. The bodies around her seize, surround, and drag her towards an elsewhere she did not choose. She looks at the viewer with a steady expression. Rapture inhabits an ancient imaginary. Art history is filled with female bodies taken, elevated, carried away, always by the will of others, always at the centre of a force that exceeds them. The Baroque costumes of the surrounding figures belong to that same iconographic tradition in which the female body existed as an object of representation, never as a subject. The direct gaze towards the viewer marks a rupture. The figure knows she is being watched and returns the gaze.