| Description | For Finlay, the French Revolution represented a cataclysmic upheaval, but also aesthetic change; prompting great moral as well as political advances that brought developments in secularism in society more generally. The texts on Four Blades carry quotations from, left to right, Denis Diderot, Nicholas Poussin, Maximilien Robespierre and Finlay himself; their form as inscriptions point toward external references of authority relating to classicism whilst at the same time the work is self-contained as the texts play off one another.
The sculptural form of the guillotine blade represents a ‘terrible beauty’ and Finlay returned to this image often. For the artist, it goes beyond the intensification of the aesthetically pleasing towards associations with the ideas of the sublime, of higher and rigorous ideals. The guillotine itself being an invention designed to create an egalitarian method of execution, providing the state with a seemingly pragmatic solution for chaos. It came to represent something very different. |
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