Personal Jesus

In the project by Davide Rivalta and Michelangelo Consani, the concept of deus ex
machina – literally “God descending from the machine”- is overturned and reinterpreted in
a profoundly human and everyday key.

No longer a divinity intervening from above to untie the knots of narration, but rather an intimate, discreet, almost silent presence that reveals itself through minimal yet salvific gestures: a touch, a gaze, a moment of listening.

It is within this horizon that the dialogue unfolds between the two bronze sculptural figures —an animal and a human—set in an open relation between natural instinct and human consciousness.

Bronze, a material traditionally tied to monumentality and solemnity, here becomes unexpectedly confiding, as if to restore a sense of sacredness to the ordinary.

The reference to Personal Jesus by Depeche Mode is no coincidence: the song becomes an anthem to spiritual intimacy, to the search for a presence able to take shape within the everyday, where transcendence is usually invoked.
The tension between desire and suffering, solitude and salvation, matter and spirit—central themes in the band’s music— resonates in these sculptures, which seem to suggest that the “personal Jesus” may
appear in the other: the animal, the human, the different, the unexpected.

The miracle, then, no longer imposes itself through spectacular epiphanies, but reveals itself in silent relations, in concrete bonds, in encounters that open unforeseen passages of meaning.