Labyrinth of Flesh

Description

I found within the root of an old olive tree what the myth had held hidden for thousands of years: the body of a bull and the labyrinth in which it is enclosed — two images fused into a single, inseparable form.

The massive left portion is the nape, the neck, a gathering of strength: smooth, flowing volumes that read as heavy musculature, poised to lunge. Here the wood is dense, almost without gaps — the body does not yet know it is trapped. But the further the eye travels to the right, the more insistently flesh turns into labyrinth: the mass breaks apart into slender, almost fragile bridges, pierced through with openings. This is no longer muscle, but the corridors and dead ends of the Palace of Knossos — built not by a mason, though, but by the tree’s own growth: organic, without a single right angle, without any geometry a human mind could grasp or master.

I see in this transition the very essence of the myth: on the surface, the strength of the bull tearing free of its bonds — but in truth, that same strength enclosed within its own corridors, doomed again and again to run into the blank wall of its own body. Victory and imprisonment here are one and the same movement, simply seen from different angles.

The dark veins in the right side of the trunk, in places nearly charred, I left untouched — there, where the tree grew with the greatest difficulty, its texture retains a tension resembling the trace of a struggle that cannot be won, because the opponent is oneself.

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