Apollo e Dafne reloaded, by the Neapolitan artist and designer Mario Coppola, is a monumental sculpture in PLA (polylactic acid) modeled through rapid prototyping by wire deposition. It is a site-specific installation, which develops vertically in fluid continuity with the vaults of the Plart Museum, where it made its debut on the occasion of the artist's personal exhibition in 2017, entitled Cosmogonie by Angela Tecce.
The work is a contemporary reinterpretation of the myth of Apollo and Daphne and is the result of an experimentation that crosses ancient and modern art, from Bernini to Moore, from Michelangelo to Boccioni. "Biodigital Madonna escaping from the visitor's gaze", is how the philosopher Leonardo Caffo defines it, highlighting how, in the actualization of the myth, Apollo's anxiety and desire - absent here - are embodied by the onlookers. In the frightened face of the nymph, a sign of an entirely human frailty, there is at the same time expressed a condition that goes beyond the human, between mythology and science fiction, where the woman is also a plant, a machine, an avatar. Mario Coppola's work is of great interest also for its formal and methodological success, and for the material used, PLA, a bioplastic of vegetable origin mainly made with corn, which can biodegrade. In fact, Mario Coppola's Daphne could one day return to the earth like that laurel bush of which Ovid tells in his Metamorphoses. A powerful suggestion that Coppola lets come out of all his works, both as an artist and as a designer.
Title: Apollo and Daphne reloaded
Author: Mario Coppola
Date: 2017
Technique: 3D printed PLA
Displayed in: Plart Foundation Naples
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