Matter and memory: two ways of sculpting the world face each other in Venice

A legion of fingers, hooky, nervous, travel the clay and waxes still fresh, squeezing cheekbones, mouths and mentons until they are deformed. Bifront faces have a macilling tone; on one side they seem incubus, on the other they have already returned from the ugliness and do not exhibit torment. A little further away, on a peana, the head and perhaps part of the torso of a geisha is scattered melted into a mass of petrified flesh, but it is still…