A new sculpture by eL Seed appeared in front of Italy’s landmark Duomo of Milan. The artwork read “hob”, which is Arabic for “love”.
eL Seed is a French-Tunisian street artist whose works incorporate traditional Arabic calligraphy, a style he calls calligraffiti. Since the 2011 Tunisian revolution, eL Seed has consciously used his art as a tool of political expression
“That’s the essence of my work – that it’s ephemeral,” says the Tunisian-French artist, who works in Dubai. “It’s there for one week, one day, one hour. And after that a souvenir stays in your mind.”
The work was a part of El Seed’s exhibition titled Templates of Love which closed in April, at the city’s Galleria Patricia Armocida, but he shared it for the first time with the public on social media last week. The exhibition featured the artist’s abstracted, open approach to calligraphy portraying 50 ways of saying Love in Arabic Language. The blue sculpture, made in fibreglass and depicting the Arabic letters for “h” and “b” in a winding teardrop shape, was the centrepiece of the room.
“Love is such a universal thing and we wanted to see how it could be expressed in different cultures, like in Senegal, Japan, Panama and Italy,” eL Seed recalls. “But because of Covid restrictions, we couldn’t do it.”
The sculpture, also called Template of Love, was sold to a private collector, but eL Seed and his team arranged for it to be installed in front of the majestic Duomo for one last outing.
“The cathedral took six centuries to build – it’s really a labour of love. This was a tribute to that,” he explains. “And the conversation between the Duomo’s Gothic architecture features and the modern calligraphy worked really well.”
