Hard Work

translucent silicon, steel
various dimension

2022

Hard Work is a series of sculptures, silicone rubber casts of common objects for man-ual work: hammers, saws, spanners, screwdrivers. The sculptres, dysfunctional, flabby and surreal, become useless objects for the pur-poses that their form still recalls and implies. Calori’s works are amusing and snarky, while also condensing the conflictual and fet-ishist tensions that are typical of surrealist objects. The material chosen for this series of works, the colour and unfunctional qualitycan be read through psychoanalytic theories: they convey a frustration of sorts due to the lack of fulfil-mentof desire. And yet an unequivocal element of parody is expressed with regards to these possible interpretations: the artworks of the Hard Work series exposethe underlying male chauvinism within classical psychoanalytic thought, within those talks about desire, fetish and sexuality that have been focused since the beginning on the male experience and its procedures of knowledge. Hard Work reflects on the relationship between the material and artistic object and the capitalist economic system within the field of art, as well as questioning the expressive methods of the sculptural language through the ‘tools of the trade’ them-selves, so as to suggest alternative forms of vision and production.

excerpt from the critical text ‘Tools of the trade: Hard Work by Letizia Calori’ Markt Studio 2022