In Outside the Circle, Alessandro Risuleo makes a radical gesture: he subtracts the body in order to reveal its essence. The human figure, veiled beneath a taut, elastic fabric, does not disappear—it transforms. It becomes pure form, temporary sculpture, frozen movement. What we see is the echo of a body, its ephemeral imprint, animated in space as a living abstraction.
The project emerges from a fundamental tension: the desire to erase the visible body without renouncing its sculptural power. The dancer—hidden yet central—carves through air with restrained gestures, allowing the fabric to define her presence, as if invisibility itself were a language. In this act, the body becomes mutable architecture, evoking the drapery of Baroque statuary or the veiled forms in the video works of Bill Viola—suspended in another state of being.
The circle of the title is more than a shape—it is a threshold. A boundary between what is inside and what is left out, between visibility and mystery, identity and the unknown. To exist outside the circle is to inhabit a liminal zone, fertile and uncertain, where the conventions of representation dissolve and the body becomes sign, trace, potential memory.
Outside the Circle is a meditation on limits, on the tension between presence and absence, gesture and silhouette, identity and dissolution. But it is also a poetic act, reminding us that seeing is not always necessary for perception—that even in concealment, a new kind of vision can be born.
