New series of beautifully made small sculptures, Alexander DeCadenet explores both the kind of society we have at present and aspects of his own biography.

The sculptures are small in scale, and being made of precious materials – some are solid silver – they rank as luxury objects in their own right. Much contemporary sculpture depends on a rhetoric of size. Large scale implies a claim to public importance. Those sculptures that are not entirely abstract address to issues they embrace like an orator shouting at a mob. The audience, in a modern city, hurries past them without pausing to look.

The same is even more likely to be true of public sculptures that have to literary or political ambitions, which are placed in public to offer a purely aesthetic experience. They function almost entirely as decorations, though many of them, when one looks at what both those who create them and those who commission them have to tell us, embodied ambitions to transcend this subservient status.

The Life Burger sculptures combine two opposing functions: they offer a sharp criticism of the society we live in, and yet, simultaneously, they are luxury objects in their own right. Much contemporary sculpture depends on a rhetoric of size. Large scale