Ernest Tino Trova
Profile Canto L.L. #8, 1976
Stainless steel
Gift of Lanny Lamont in honor of Miss Vicki Lamont
Lifelong St. Louis artist Ernest Trova is best known for the motif of the falling man. Over time, Trova’s falling men became more fragmented and abstract, as in Profile Canto L.L. #8, where the once three-dimensional figure exists as a flat profile.
About the idea of the generic figure, Trova explained, “I believe that man is first of all an imperfect creature. The first reaction I usually get to this is that I'm pessimistic. I don't think I am.... It's very close to many theories of man — the Catholic view that man is a fallen creature, for example.” Perhaps this relationship to the idea of a man whose sins cause him to tumble from god’s grace also relates to the introduction of “canto,” into the works’ titles. A canto is a division of a long poem; perhaps the most famous is example is Dante’s "Divine Comedy," an exploration of the Christian afterlife.
However, the works are not necessarily fatalistic or without hope. They can suggest man’s ability to retain his dignity in difficult circumstances, as the artist also noted that they remain rational or balanced even in precarious situations, and that while they move toward “an eventual fall into inevitable oblivion, what becomes important to man (the Falling Man) is the not the destination we have come to expect—death.”