Through bodies that grieve, confront and protect, the Italian sculptor brings the language of classical sculpture into the emotional realities of the present.
By Nicolò Di Stefano
A man holds a lifeless body across his lap. His hands support its weight; his face contracts under a burden that strength cannot resolve. The anatomy is precise, but the encounter begins somewhere beyond technique. Before we notice the marble, we recognise the effort of holding someone who can no longer hold themselves.
This is JAGO’s Pietà, completed in 2021. Its composition recalls one of the most familiar images in Western sculpture, while replacing the maternal figure with a man. The change moves through the entire work. Grief becomes paternal, physical and exposed. The body that supports the dead is muscular, yet completely powerless before the loss. Jago
That tension runs through JAGO’s practice: the ability to give stone an extraordinary appearance of life, coupled with an insistence on showing how vulnerable life remains.
Learning to remove
Born Jacopo Cardillo in Frosinone in 1987, JAGO attended art school and subsequently the Academy of Fine Arts, leaving the latter in 2010. His education began within institutions, but his development continued through an independent practice grounded in traditional sculptural techniques. Gallerie d’Italia Napoli
An early portrait of Pope Benedict XVI became a decisive work. Created in 2009, the marble bust initially presented its subject through the clothing of his office. In 2016, JAGO returned to the sculpture and removed those garments, transforming it into Habemus Hominem. Jago
The transformation offers a useful way of understanding his approach. Carving removes material, but here removal also changes identity. The institutional portrait gives way to an ageing body. Wrinkles and exposed flesh carry the image; authority becomes inseparable from mortality.
There is a particular risk in returning to a finished sculpture. The artist has to surrender an earlier resolution to discover another. In this case, the same stone holds two successive ways of seeing one person.
It is also where JAGO’s technical skill becomes something more demanding than resemblance. The question shifts from how accurately a person can be represented to what remains when the signs of their position disappear.
Letting the public into the work
His official biography records periods living and working in Italy, China and America, alongside teaching at the New York Academy of Art in 2018. In New York, he began Figlio Velato, extending his exploration of the body and its vulnerability. Jago
Alongside the sculptures, another part of his practice developed: showing how they are made. Through videos and social media, JAGO shares the production process directly with his audience. Jago
This changes the relationship between viewer and object. A finished statue can make its own creation seem almost impossible. Watching the work develop restores the sequence of decisions behind it: a surface gradually becomes a shoulder, a contour becomes a face, and a block acquires a gesture.
The distinction matters in an age when images arrive already complete. JAGO makes an ancient, physically demanding practice legible through contemporary channels. The screen becomes an entrance to the workshop.
That visibility also creates an interesting tension. An image travels instantly; a sculpture demands time. His audience encounters both speeds at once, following the work digitally while understanding that its physical transformation cannot happen at the pace of a scroll.
The body as a question
In Look Down, dated 2020, a baby curls against the ground. Installed in Naples’s Piazza del Plebiscito in November that year, the work brought an image of extreme vulnerability into public space. Jago
The title directs the viewer’s body as much as their attention. To look down is to abandon the upward gaze usually associated with monuments. The encounter happens beneath us.
In the supplied photograph, the folded limbs and closed eyes make the figure feel withdrawn from its surroundings. Its scale gives that small, defenceless posture a presence that is difficult to pass over. The work asks something of our attention before it asks for interpretation.
Narciso, a statuary marble sculpture from 2023, approaches recognition differently. A crouching male figure faces a female figure beneath him, arranged in the position where a reflection might appear. Jago
The visual relationship unsettles the expectation established by the title. Looking for oneself leads to another body. Read this way, the sculpture opens a question about identity: how much of what we recognise as ourselves depends on what we see in someone else?
JAGO’s figures are immediately readable, yet that accessibility does not settle their meaning. Familiar anatomy draws us close; a changed relationship keeps us looking.
Who gets to be heroic?
With David, JAGO makes another deliberate intervention in an inherited image. His protagonist is a woman, carrying the sling and stone associated with the biblical confrontation.
Gallerie d’Italia in Naples exhibited the plaster model in 2025. Its account traces the project to an initial clay study made in 2020 and describes the subsequent translation into a Carrara marble block more than four metres high. The model and the marble project are distinct stages of the work. Gallerie d’Italia Napoli
The significance begins with the figure’s bearing. In the photograph, her head turns and her gaze holds its direction. She appears alert, measuring something beyond the frame.
Placing a woman within this recognisable heroic language changes who occupies the image of courage. The reference to Michelangelo supplies a shared visual memory; JAGO uses that memory to make room for another protagonist.
His dialogue with tradition works through such shifts. A familiar composition survives, while the person inside it changes our understanding of the story.
Beyond the complete figure
The same attention to bodily life appears in Apparato circolatorio, a 2017 work comprising thirty ceramic elements and a video installation. Here, the heart becomes a subject in its own right. The practice extends beyond marble into a relationship between sculptural form and the moving image. Jago
With Natura morta in 2025, the focus moves to objects capable of destroying the bodies his other works ask us to consider. A marble basket holds weapons. Presented at Milan’s Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana in dialogue with Caravaggio’s Basket of Fruit, it turns the still-life tradition towards contemporary violence. Jago
The carved basket and pale surfaces initially invite admiration. Recognition follows: the contents are guns. Technical beauty makes the encounter more uncomfortable, holding the eye on objects whose purpose is harm.
A place for the encounter
In May 2023, JAGO’s workshop in Naples’s Church of Sant’Aspreno ai Crociferi opened to the public as the Jago Museum. The move gave a physical setting to the relationship he had cultivated through the visibility of his work. Gallerie d’Italia Napoli
Across these different settings, his sculptures return to a persistent concern: what a body can reveal through its posture, its exposure and its relationship to another.
The supporting hands in Pietà remain a particularly clear expression of that concern. Their anatomy demonstrates control. Their gesture acknowledges its limits.
JAGO gives marble the appearance of flesh, then uses that flesh to show the experiences that resist mastery: grief, dependence, recognition, courage. The stone endures. The people it brings before us remind us how much of being human depends on what we cannot keep.
QEditorial Magazine — Fashion · Culture · Identity
Images sourced from JAGO’s official website media kit and reproduced for editorial and informational purposes. Copyright remains with the respective rights holders.
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