"BAO SCULPTURE"

"BAO" is from here and there, now and always. It is from Africa and Greece, from the springtime of humanity and its future.

Cléa identifies personally with this work, which is like her spiritual self-portrait. "BAO" arose in the vermilion-red desert dunes of the Namib, which are Cléa's meditation ground and source of inspiration.

"BAO" is me, but it's also all of humanity in all eternity. She says of her work.

"BAO is a woman unless he is a man. She was born in Africa, unless it was more than 5000 years ago, at the beginning of the Bronze Age, in the Cyclades archipelago. It is from this world or another. It is a belief in a spirit, a vital force that animates living beings and objects, but also natural elements such as stones or the wind.

It is what Cléa learnt from African wisdoms and animist beliefs as necessary attempts to sacralise living things in a modernist approach close to contemporary ecological conceptions.

It is the result of the emotional shock Cléa experienced during her visit to the Goulandrís art museum in Kolonáki, Athens, where she was confronted as a child with the contemplation of Cycladic sculptures.

"BAO" is a Cycladic work in its sobriety of form, its primitive "essentialism" and its extreme stylistic sophistication.