Elephant Man is a reclining figure drawn in pastel, charcoal, conté and gouache on watercolour paper that has been carved and burned. Milo has worked on it since 2015, and it keeps changing.
Source
The figure comes from Figure A on the west pediment of the Parthenon, the reclining river god often identified as the Ilissos. The marble survives as a ruin. Its head and arms wore away over centuries, leaving a torso caught in the act of rising. Milo starts from that broken body and carries the damage further.
Greek sculptors showed the river god as a man-headed bull, as a horned man with the tail of a fish, or as a reclining man pouring water from a jar. Here he has a giant elephant eye at the centre of his trunk.
The drawing
The body sprawls across the paper, its limbs cut short and swollen. The torso folds in around a huge spiralling eye, or wound, and the rings of flesh pull the gaze toward the centre. The skin is mottled and bruised by years of revision. Pale flesh turns ochre and rust at the ends of the limbs, as if the body were turning to stone. The right hand, red and clawed, grips at cloth or at its own decay. Above the figure, a dense filigree of blue-silver ornament spreads across the ground, delicate as lace against the weight of the body.
A white cloud rises from the figure’s penis, which is bruised and scorched like the rest of the flesh. The cloud reads as seed, breath, spirit and smoke at once. In alchemy, a white substance released from a wounded body marks the albedo, the purification that follows the blackening. The sexual and the sacred share the same place here. Life keeps pouring out of a body that looks close to death.
Cut and burned
The paper is cut along the outline of the body and burned at the edges, so the drawing has no rectangular frame. It exists as a fragment, the way the Parthenon figure does. Photographs from 2016 and 2018 show earlier states, when the figure still lay on a patterned ground among other drawings.
In February 2022 Milo set the drawing alight in the studio and photographed it burning. Fire is one of the tools of the work. It takes material away, darkens the edges and leaves marks that the next layer of drawing answers.
Installed
Elephant Man has been shown lit by candles, under a single light, and alongside other works such as Redhead and Godclit. It was shown in La FIN, Milo’s retrospective at Sparrow Artspace and Grenouille Kralik Studios in Calgary, from 5 to 31 December 2024. For that show Milo declared all of his works finished. The declaration was short-lived. He soon returned to reworking, and Elephant Man is still in progress.
The title
The title recalls Joseph Merrick, whose body was put on display and whose humanity had to be found beneath it. The drawing holds the same tension. It is repulsive and tender, monumental and collapsing. It asks to be looked at and makes looking hard. Like the marble it comes from, it is a piece broken from something larger and left open to forces bigger than itself.
Reference: Cast of Figure A (Ilissos), west pediment of the Parthenon, Royal Academy of Arts
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