Yak Rivais

Milo Dias’ clenched fists.

“With all power his caricature and his carnival” (Michel Leiris).

In the beginning were Daumier and his parliamentarians, and the grimaciers of Messerschmitt. At the beginning, because in the work of Milo Dias, if the trigger is indeed satire and derision by the play of an obsessively renewed caricature, it is advisable to locate two times: a first era, here exposed, at the search for the real lost or in danger of being lost, and a second era (unexposed) supported by the imagination and the use of intermediate waste, the driving force of “outsider art. “

“Every man is responsible for his mouth,” said Jean-Paul Sartre. The expressions of Milo Dias’ heads owe to the “objective chance” of the surrealists the appearance of the physical truth of the characters, between pain and mockery, as if it were a question of unmasking them by the emergence of the mask.

In 1989, Milo Dias saw his father die of lightning cancer: he clenched his fists of anger and helplessness in the face of exploding suffering. He clenches his fists with the clay inside, which he crushes, mistreats, mixes, organizes and sums up human beings reduced to mimics. Unsympathetic, unhappy people (“Men die and they are not happy” asserted Caligula by Albert Camus), squeaky in defense, “as a way of setting limits to what is detestable in the human nature, “says Milo Dias. Louis-Ferdinand Céline summed it up differently: “Everyone cries time in their own way”.

 Preface to the catalog “MILO DIAS, Figurative Sculptures” (2018)