Michael Landy

The work was made and shown for the first time in Art Lovers at Thomas Dane Gallery Naples, a work in response to Naples but continuing the work begun during his year long residency at the National Gallery in London in 2023. During that residency, Landy focused on the saints depicted in works exhibited in the paintings of the museum’s collection, culminating in a project that explored their representation, but in animated sculptural form.

Landy’s longstanding interest in self-destruction, and the inspiration from Tinguely’s self-destructive, dysfunctional, and subversive kinetic sculptures, is evident in his interpretation of the saints as martyrs.

In Saints Alive Landy seeks to recover the saints, once universally recognized and respected but now forgotten, by emphasizing their methods of their demise and inviting the viewer to actively participate in it. Through a mechanism and a pedal, visitors are encouraged to engage with and contribute to the dynamics of destruction.

San Gennaro, the patron saint of Naples who was martyred by decapitation, is presented in a new kinetic sculpture. The saint’s decapitated body conceals a mechanism, visible through an aperture in his robe. Landy draws visual reference of the saint’s decapitation from the depiction in in Girolamo Pesce’s 1727 painting. The saint’s body now lies static, the blood dripping conspicuously as the only dynamic element.

The audience engages with the sculpture through the blood; a pedal activates its copious outflow. The centralising of the ‘blood’ as active participant and medium alludes to the myth and cult of San Gennaro: twice a year, the liquefaction of the saint’s blood, kept in an ampulla, is celebrated in Naples’ cathedral. The blood’s liquefaction is considered a miracle; its failure, an ill omen. Thus, the blood becomes an almost catastrophic element erupting from the saint’s body.