Between the sacred and the profane, Holy Tears takes a familiar image and disrupts its stillness without erasing its power. The Marian figure retains her halo and distant gaze, yet the suffering she traditionally embodies exceeds all measure: it becomes blood, blade, flame, the presence of death. It is no longer merely contemplated, it is exposed.
Yet the work does not rely on the shock of this transformation. What makes it less immediate is, above all, its materiality. Wool and yarn give substance to a violent image through a soft, almost inviting surface. What should wound draws us closer; what belongs to devotion takes on the features of a more restless, contemporary visual language. The visual experience becomes one of ecstasy.
It is within this contradiction that the work finds its strength. The skull held tightly in her arms heightens the ambiguity: it may be a warning, a relic, a body to protect, or an alien presence that has entered the icon. The gesture that embraces it also transforms an emblem of death into something intimate, almost something to be cherished. Nothing settles into a definitive meaning.
Holy Tears thus puts an image deeply embedded in collective memory to the test. It contaminates it, wounds it, gives it material form, without managing (or perhaps without intending) to exhaust its power. Beneath every layer, the Madonna continues to endure and to look back at us.