Unable to fit in a visit to gallery PaceWildenstein on a recent venture to New York, I explored the online exhibition of Jim Dine: Pinocchio — sculptures inspired by Carlo Collodi’s boy puppet.
My Angel (above) in particular grabbed my attention, as one of the few peices depicting the boy emerging from the wood; the result is fairly heartbreaking. Dine suggests the delicate craftmanship of Pinocchio’s carpenter creator; facial features begin to peak out from this once-living block of now-dead material.
The puppets seem playful but sad, a tone evoked by the lively and often sloppy application of paint in vibrant primary hues, combined with the melancholy depiction of the boy unfinished — static, fragile, half-naked, the wood roughly rendered and recurrently exposed. He is largely stripped of the familiar narrative, seemingly left to wait for some sort of human or divine/fairy intervention, waiting to be completed. Mr. Dine’s Pinocch’ exists as a vague abstraction of a boy, shackled by the powerlessness of youth and left vulnerable to the consequential corruption that lies ahead.
