You may not have heard of Christopher Conte before and only because he started offering his unique sculptures for sale to the public for the first time last year. He's so freshly unknown that if you type his name in Wikipedia's search field and hit Enter, a strange message appears on your screen saying that "no results were found". I tried this and was amazed to see that more on this mysterious character couldn't be found in the virtual vault of Wiki. Further search has revealed that the name of Christopher Conte belongs to a sculptor who started drawing at the age of 3 and whose work seems to have retained something of H.R. Geiger's.

His sculptures are far from being actual sculptures as they seem more like "old-fashion studies depicted with contemporary materials". I doubt that metal could ever be regarded as a "contemporary material" unless of course we're dealing with memory-metals that can be shaped and twisted any way one may like only to later re-assume their original shape if exposed to the right temperature. However, Mr. Conte's "sculptures" are not made of such sci-fi compounds but rather out of regular matter, bent, welded, screwed with mathematical precision in order to highlight the symmetry of life, thought and even discovery and technological improvement, though such concepts cannot be normally and easily fathomed. Art is always a means of dissecting the complex processes and occurrences in life whether they stand by themselves or are linked to other matters equally or more or less complicated.

All of Mr. Conte's sculptures seem like they have been granted the gift of life, like some golem-like creatures rather than simple yet beautiful inanimate objects. When I first saw pictures of his works I almost expected to find an "EMET" (Truth) inscribed on them, just like in one of Borge's tellings about alchemy and about how the process could be reversed if the animated creature could no longer be controlled, by erasing the "E", revealing the word "MET" (Death) which led to the collapse of the golem.

The "sculptures" don't move by themselves though many of them are articulated to some extent and Mr. Conte has been making insect prototypes that could be controlled via programmable microprocessors. The blend of technology and strong and obvious elements of human nature leads to a rather unexpected portrayal of the mechanisms of life which are represented like the autonomous extensions of an unseen mastermind machinery. His works have already been used by the Discovery Channel and MTV networks so you can expect something even cooler than the works of Pricasso and the rubber horses.