Skull Study

Edmond Casarella

In his later career, Edmond Casarella predominantly worked in sculpture, and a great deal of stylistic information was exchanged between his printmaking and his work in the third dimension. Here, we can see that his transition into sculpture was inevitable, as even early in his artistic path he felt out the dimenstionality of his subjects on the paper.

The abstracted skull of a large animal, perhaps a horse, is carved into an angular and almost machine-like composition, and is viewed from the underside-out, its lower jaw removed. At first it is a jumble of energetic lines, but on closer inspection there are the rows of teeth, the plane of the maxilla, the sinewy lines along the jaw leading to the intersection of the spinal cord - seen almost in motion, like a structure of ball bearings and pistons.