Angelus Novus: Baroque Ruin

A series of three distinct images that make up this triptych represents a work I recently created, on the morning of October 7, 2025, in Turin. I titled it Angelus Novus, after the watercolor by Paul Klee that was purchased in 1921 by the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin and is now housed in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
"A painting by Klee shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he is intensely contemplating. His eyes are fixed, his mouth is open, his wings are outstretched. This is how one imagines the angel of history..." (W. Benjamin)

For the German philosopher, history was not a clear narrative of improvement, but an accumulation of ruins swept away by the storm of modernity.
In our age of technological upheaval, social fragmentation, climate anxiety, and political extremism, the figure of the angel of history continues to resonate. Klee's angel suggests the enduring role of art in bearing witness, resisting simplification, and creating spaces for reflection. In a world inundated with images, a silent and disturbing figure still has power.
When I create, I do so in silence, guided by intuition, without asking too many questions. I immediately caught sight of a man in profile who vaguely reminded me of Borges, and then I began layering shot after shot, a kind of photographic architecture.

So in this simultaneity, in a physical space of a few square meters, I think I have captured allegory and ruin, a powerful point of contact with Walter Benjamin.
The wall is a contemporary ruin, where the classical structure has been obliterated and sealed by modernity (the concrete blocks). The allegory: the sealed wall is not only a physical block, but the interruption of history; what was open has been closed, what was history is now silence. The angel who looks at the past as an accumulated catastrophe (the ruins/the sealed portal), while being pushed inexorably toward the future.

Ultimately, this is the map of an absence: the absence of history (the walled-up portal), the absence of the entrance (the barred door), the absence of a face (the man in profile).

Photo and text by Luca Periotto
NP November 2025