Death is not the greatest enemy; time and obliviousness annihilate beauty. Lali Fruheling kisses the dead, beauties she awakens. She attempts to give breath to a mother, a pair of lovers, a local rock star, the spirit of youth. Longing is also an agony connecting those who have died to those who are about to, dancing with time in the face of the body’s diminishing beauty, hoping to return it to life – in a wish predestined to be unsuccessful.
Fruheling’s toils seek to achieve perfection, but it almost always contains a defect. The juxtapositions expose a broad range of realistic reflections and point to the disruption, to the love of deformity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2DyIRVowFw
As in a film, each work is a frame; the viewers go from one cut to the next. Prosaic situations undergo transformations, becoming sculptural, theatrical, almost supernatural. Pictures and images hold memory. Death cannot be preserved. Like life, death too is organic, transient. The dead die, disappear, dissipate. Their loving ones refuse to let go. They try holding them, If not in eternity, then in the present.
A pair of severed head sculptures – Fruheling and Fadida – are displayed on a table. A picture from a marriage. A twenty-year shared life is cast as a violent, hypnotizing, naturalistic spectacle that captures the hidden force of time. The couple’s eyes are closed. They are sleeping, dreaming, seem to be dead. The two heads on the table are like domestic nature, like two vases waiting for flowers, like a love story.
The tradition of replicating and preserving the faces or bodies of the departed – from the busts of antiquity to contemporary Wax Museums – stemmed from the need to keep the dead close to life and look at them with no fear. The casting of wax statues had eased the horror of absence and dulled the longing, becoming a living-dead performance that compensates for the loss. The busts glorified and fixed the silent figure of the dead in life. Perhaps they might come back. The bust became inseparable from its subject. Realism had canceled the imitation, the kitsch, the horror, and the embarrassment, making room for the yearning for the object. Almost the real thing.
A large fanzine-like paper sculpture hangs from the ceiling like a slough, hovering, revealing and blocking the field of vision around it. The hands of a man and a woman, covered in tattoos, curve around the sculpture’s surface. They hold one another, perhaps completing the severed busts’ missing bodies.
An electric guitar – an homage to Charlie Megira’s Perspex guitar “Flashy-Trashy” – is cast in wax. The passion of youth, the fire of love, unforgettable shows, iconic events, a final note, leaving the stage, coming back, a finale followed by guitars being slammed into the floor, breaking into shards, ‘The End.’ All are compiled into a single image, a wax object, a memorial candle to innocence, lost youth, and, in one fell swoop, a deadly, emasculating hacking.
A small photograph is hidden in the fringes of the exhibition, like a heart. Two crossed palms, with two words written in pen on the knuckles: L O V E H A T E. These are the hands of Fruheling’s late mother. Her presence pulsates even though she is gone. The photograph is like a tiny gate between life and death, between the lit and the darkened.
There, where the exhibition darkens, two bizarre, almost supernatural events take place: a potato-chips packet floats and whirls above the pedestal. Nearby, an immortal, eternal hero rises, a local Elvis – Charlie Megira. His face is alternately revealed and concealed, flickering like in a fata morgana, shimmering, flowing in red-orange-yellow. Droning sounds pour dreamily, endlessly, stretching like a sweet sunset, a dim, ghostly echo, a lullaby to Charlie who had sung and shouted quietly.
Death is not the greatest enemy but longing.