Jone Kvie: salthour

Upon entering the exhibition, one first encounters the experience of time through mass (2025), a massive lava stone crater sourced from the still-active Mount Etna, resting on a steel structure. Presented as a geological specimen, its shape is reminiscent of an eye – silently watching. It evokes the remains of monumental ancient statues, where only fragments endure: an eye, a hand, a finger, yet each carrying deep significance. The crater holds the memory and threat of past and future eruptions, charged with both geological and symbolic force. As lava stone is an everyday material commonly used for pavements in cities like Naples and Pompeii, the sculpture also embodies the tension between the ordinary and the primordial. Like ancient relics, the experience of time through massinhabits the space between ruin and monument, geology and imagination.

On the back of the crater, almost like a quiet secret, lies a thin, curved, fossilized sheet of black rock containing traces of Earth’s earliest life: soft, mollusk-like organisms that once moved through the waters several hundred million years ago. This subtle gesture, easily overlooked, anchors the work’s symbolic gravity: from volcanic birth to evolutionary emergence, from chaos to cognition. 

In direct dialogue with the experience of time through mass is revenant (2025), a large relief consisting of two marble sheets leaning against the wall, with geological patterns reminiscent of branching veins radiating from a central, spine-like structure. It suggests both anatomical diagrams and tectonic fissures. The work reflects the origins of complex life, alluding to the evolution of early multicellular organisms into the intricate nervous systems of advanced beings. In marble, this evolutionary arc becomes monumental – a meditation on the delicate emergence of life as it takes shape within the contemporary body.

Detritus (2025) continues Kvie’s long-standing engagement with found materials sourced from the urban fabric of Naples. In a city where stone is both abundant and disposable, Kvie reimagines discarded objects and transforms them into sculptures that hover between function and ritual. Originally designed as a bathroom countertop, the form now takes on a quiet, humanoid presence – solitary, almost body-like in its stance.

What once invited now resists, standing instead as a monument to transformation. Kvie’s sculptural playfulness recalls the language of early modernism, particularly Hans Arp’s biomorphic forms assembled with intuitive precision.

The eponymous work salthour(2025) expands Kvie’s investigation of overlooked urban fragments, reimagined as sculptural markers. Two travertine forms recall protective elements that guard gateposts from urban wear and vehicle damage. Resting quietly in a corner, their placement evokes a forgotten ritualism – at once peculiar and dignified – where the banal is quietly elevated into something transcendent.