Holy Cow! is conceived as a ritual diptych: every image has a twin, every mark its counter-mark. The same scene returns and flips, like a formula spoken twice to alter its effect. The transition into the negative is not merely optical: it is a conversion, a transmigration of matter, an “elsewhere” opening behind the skin of the paper.
At the core stand the herd-figures (cyclopean bulls and cows) claimed as emblems of control and vigilance. In the Aspromonte (a region of southern Italy), animals are not only landscape: they can become territorial management, silent occupation, proof of power. Here that grammar is stated directly. The ’Ndrangheta (a mafia-type criminal organisation based in Calabria, Italy) is named as a cultural and political background, a system of codes and boundaries. Yet the works do not illustrate it, they expose it, unsettle it, and transform it into a theatre of signs.
Bodies become maps and initiatory tablets: incisions, pictograms, fluids, ropes, sun-eyes that burn or cool. The line functions as writing; and writing is also chromatic, organised along three axes that sustain the whole series: white/black, warm/cool, green/purple. This is not decoration. It is a cosmology of oppositions, where each colour is an energy, each inversion a moral decision.
In Holy Cow! the beast is not a beast: it is totem, sentinel, idol, and target. The single eye at the centre of the face does not promise salvation; it promises attention. And still, within that relentless attention, the mystical appears: the possibility that a sign can overturn a fate, that a ritual can change hands, that the map of power can be re-written as a map of release.
