Nicole Albertini

This sculpture belongs to a series called Donatello’s Lesson. For Donatello, the act of sculpting harks back to the ancestral craft of goldsmithing. Here, sculpting once again evokes the inaugural power of adornment, as if one were calling out to the heavens for an inalienable horse. Adorning no longer opposes emptiness to fullness, but cuts through the void itself, revealing an opening to the collection of the unheard. This is where this Horse’s Head comes from, in its expanding gallop: from Donatello’s gesture that inhabited it on the one hand, and on the other, from a defeated horse that breathed its soul onto my hand. I owe my being here to these defeated gallops that guide, impassive and tumultuous, the thoughts of my hand.

My work is contemporary with that of the sculptors who raised stones to the sky, of the Greeks who dressed a piece of wood, of the man who chiselled the stone hair of Mary Magdalene… The contemporary is anachronistic! From this position, I’m not trying to create a form in space, but to enliven the space torn from the oblivion of my hands. Forgotten by what? Nobody remembers. You have to sculpt, which means not forgetting, ‘flowers do not meet death, and what will be mere promise’ Mandelstam.