THE WAX AND THE FIRE

摘要

'The past,' as LP Hartley wrote in his 1953 bestseller, The Go-Between, 'is another country: they do things differently there.' Differently, but still implicitly part of our sensual, emotional and imaginatively charged present. Bronze, the Royal Academy's new show, allows us to experience the past not as if it were in a vitrine, but as an alchemy of form, materiality, light, time - and human presence.The exhibition opens with a Grecian showstopper: the damaged, almost limbless Dancing Satyr from 400BC, his cranium trepanned, his body covered in an exquisite psoriasis of stippled verdigris and darker, smoother patinations.