Apollo e Dafne

Alik Cavaliere has a true passion for mythology, resulting from a well-founded classical culture; myths understood as authentic truths, in fantastic or poetic form, endowed with a sentimental coherence that allows them to narrate humanity, its fears, and hopes without boundaries of time or space, making them eternally relevant. As Elena Pontiggia writes in “Alik Cavaliere. Catalog of Sculptures”: “…moving in the realm of myth and dream, one can elude death itself.” In particular, the Artist frequently revisits the myth of Apollo and Daphne. Here, nature, in this case, is salvific, welcoming and transforming Daphne, who flees from Apollo's advances: a recurring theme that Cavaliere has addressed with extraordinary mastery. The sculptor conveys, through the hardness of metals, the grace of the woman fleeing from violence and her trusting surrender to Artemis, narrating the price of freedom and the renunciation of life through life itself. As the Artist writes in one of his Notebooks, in Daphne “it is nature that reclaims its dominion over man, avenging itself by assimilating the woman and depriving him of a love he failed to win. A nature that is partly an earthly paradise, partly hostile. A nature that generates beyond itself ghosts and images, partly impenetrable, partly indecipherable.”