Many curious emotions get up from the images in Andrea Modica’s new e book, Theatrum Equorum. They emerge slowly, and on occasion strangely, between deliberately repetitive pictures of horses mendacity in repose, resting on beds of shredded paper, enclosed by means of darkish, and featureless partitions. It isn’t a context the place we’re familiar with seeing horses. They’re intended to be open air, in a box, trotting off into the sundown. Nonetheless lifes made up of crude-looking surgical equipment, probably used to perform on those majestical creatures are interspersed, on occasion organized sparsely, different instances in scattered, bloody piles.
Flipping in the course of the pages of Modica’s e book is like flipping between two singular pictures—or are there 80? We by no means commute some distance, returning time and again to a equivalent position however with a brand new sensation. It’s this contradiction this is so curious. A scene that a number of pages in the past regarded non violent transforms into one thing uncomfortably tragic. Gear laid out to fix wounds and save lives additionally appear terrifying and harsh. The lives of horses are so in detail tied to human historical past. They’ve carried us and our assets throughout continents, plowed our fields, died in our battles, and grown wings in our myths. Within the sanatorium, those horses lay improving from surgical procedures, some life-saving. Do the horses know what is going on to them, do they perceive ache and therapeutic? How did they finally end up right here and what lifestyles are they returning to? A unmarried symbol on the finish of the e book is the one example we come upon a human. A masked surgeon stands towards a wall with gloved palms held sparsely above a waist soaked in blood. Curious emotions certainly… —Alex Nicholson
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