The Guardian Animals + other invisible beings, Moretti Gallery, London

Site-specific installation for Frieze Art Fair 2016

Entering the central and the right rooms (The White Hall), there are the AdE diurnal animals arranged on white paper, they are The Guardian Animals of the AdE kids.
The room on the left hosts the nocturnal animals, graphite drawings on a black background, creatures that embody the entomological version of the Seven Deadly Sins.
Each of the three rooms has as its Guiding Image: a masterpiece of Italian art history from the Moretti Gallery collection. The Guardian Angel by Carlo Dolci, an important seventeenth-century Florentine painter, is a classic God of Protection, like all the Atelier creatures on display in these two gallery rooms. Powerful and energetic, affectionate but also violent if necessary, they are hardly ever vengeful creatures. They simply act in self-defence, as the children in the Atelier would say, in order to balance the parts, a practice of Justice, here and now, on earth. Then a small and precious Saint Anthony Abbot by Luca Signorelli. The protector of domestic animals is found as if in a small stable where creatures that are at home in the AdE rest and show themselves.
In the Black Hall, on the left, there’s a painting on gold leaf background by the 14th-century artist Andrea de Bartoli, depicting St Michael the Archangel. We responded to the absolute light of a gold background with its opposite: graphite on black cardboard. The Luciferian presence at the Archangel foot, inspired us to depict the 7 deadly sins in an entomological key: an indolent, bored and inactive ant, classically slothful, a lustful cockroach, an obese roach that gorges until it bursts, a superbly anorexic vespis, and so on.