It is part of a series of sculptures that take sequences from the narrative context of legends from the civilization of Ancient Greece filtered through the sculptor's imagination with the intention of formulating a new optics sometimes suggesting movement as a process of metamorphosis.
The ancient Greeks understood that all human dramas pivot on the omnipresent and inevitable experience of loss. Greek mythology revolves around this essential paradox of human life.
Our time is limited, our control is limited and from this is born the great emotion of human existence. We love intensely, because we know that our control is weak.
The love story of Orpheus and Eurydice exemplifies this principle in all its heartbreaking beauty.
According to legend, Eurydice, Orpheus' bride, dies at their wedding after being bitten by a snake. Orpheus prays to the gods to allow him to save her, descending into the underworld to bring Eurydice back to life.
The gods allow him to try, but on one condition - while leaving the underworld he must not look back at his wife who follows him. Orpheus respected this condition until the threshold of the underworld; but when he was ready to cross the fatal border, pushed by fear and the impatience of love, he looked back, at that moment, the gods are faithful to their cruel promise, and Eurydice is pulled back into the darkness and thus loses his wife for the second time. This last passage is the theme of the sculpture: when Orpheus turns his head and looks at Eurydice.
The two characters were sculpted in unusual shapes because both are in a dreamlike, unreal environment, in eternity. The lower half of Orpheus is in bas-relief, walking through the unnatural space of the underworld, and the upper part of his body is three-dimensional. Eurydice is just an illusion, which is why she was sculpted in negative.