The mortal tiredness of living
“The mortal tiredness of living” textile and clay 2017
“The dressing-gown had, in the eyes of Oblomov, inestimable virtues: it is soft and floating, one no longer feels its body; Like a docile slave, it lends itself to all movements.”
Oblomov is motionless, dressed in a clay shell, he huddles in this vertical bed. He opened his eyes to the world and took refuge under his armor. Ruined, devoured, assailed by the interior, he yields to this “pain without wound” to resist. His heart is still beating but his blood is empty. Sick of life, lucid lying, this robe of flesh is his shroud and his board of salvation to escape the world.
Florence Bruyas shows in his work this memento mori of a laziness that refutes the irremediable. She writes in the flesh of Oblomov, novel of the Russian writer Ivan Goncharov (1859), a renunciation to remain in the world and reveals its intimate history. The dressing-gown, which had become a dress of skinned flesh, exposed itself like Rembrandt’s beef, and offered its human materiality a life at the edge of skin.
Thierry Gozzi