Lucifer (2024)

In Belgium there is a cathedral which houses one of humanity's greatest works of art, the historically controversial marble statue Le genie du mal (1848).¹ Based on this in Toronto is my Lucifer (2024), a 3D printed plastic bit of blasphemy which extends this tradition of artistic controversy into our modern context.²

Guillaume Geefs' Le genie du mal in St. Paul's Cathedral in Liège, Belgium. Protography by Danny Hellman³

I have a lifelong love affair with Freedom, and what it means to have the power to be Free. I physically escaped from a religious indoctrination facility in the 3rd grade. Police recaptured and remanded me to the principal's office, and then I learned that even the faithless fear the higher power of the state.

Institutional and religious narratives glorify blind obedience and demonize free thought, exemplified literally in demonizing the concept of Free Will with Lucifer. It is foul metaphysical legerdemain to cast the character representing Freedom as the villain! It took decades of recovery before I was able to engage positively with religious artworks, and now I'm learning to respect and reappropriate their narrative utility.

Ryan Futures' Lucifer at home in Mallo Coffee Bar in Toronto, Canada.⁴

The big pink Lucifer that sits behind the bar in Mallo’s Permanent Collection urges patrons to believe in themselves, and suggests they deserve a little treat.

I fear he may be my greatest accomplishment.

What I imagine him whispering to people as they try to order their coffee...

My gratitude is eternal to the giant shoulders I stand on, particularly Omar and the Mallo family, without whose moral and material support my work would not be possible. Thank you! There are too many shoulders to name, Guillaume Geefs, Jesus Christ, Isaac Newton...⁵

Mallo's Lucifer is close to my heart, and not just because it is the most public evidence of my having existed. To understand why, we need to delve a little into art history.

Photograph by Marwa Tawfiq Al-Kufaishi⁶

Mallo's street sign is an adaptation of Michelangelo's The Creation Of Adam from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.⁷

Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam⁸

Here we see the God Of The Covenant serving Adam a coffee with the iconic pink Mallo lid.

Enhance!

From this it follows that God is canonically a Mallo barista, with all the attendant theological implications, bringing all of Christian art and history into play.

Michelangelo's The Fall and Expulsion from Paradise⁹

The Sistine Chapel ceiling also includes The Fall and Expulsion from Paradise, where we see Lucifer in the form of the tempting snake, offering forbidden fruit to humanity. Our Lucifer has kept this piece of tasted fruit with him, along with his broken crown and shattered scepter, in his sculptural depiction.

There are many great religious works that, absent a personal religious tradition, most people never encounter. The way old works find new light shed on them intrigues me.¹⁰ Le genie du mal was introduced to the wider consciousness of the internet through an art history enjoyer's post whose origination I'm still trying to track down. The etymology of memes is not simple to follow, but this is one early example¹¹:

That's tumblr in 2022, although I have a vague personal memory of a much older and more explanatory post. Please let me know if you can shed any light on this history! I have found this twitter post with the same text from 2017:

There is a spike in the searches for Le Genie Du Mal in 2005 shown on Google Trends, and getting results from that era is increasingly challenging, so I'm making myself comfortable with potentially never knowing the complete memetic geneology during this century.

There are many people encountering Lucifer at Mallo as their first exposure, for whom tracking post history matters not at all. Will someone one day be digging through The Wayback Machine at The Internet Archive trying to date my original writings?¹² Perhaps, and only if we avoid a new dark age.

We're experiencing the early stages of a new dark age now, as link rot and enshittification already enact a regularly lamentable series of digital library burnings every year. I was able to locate an earlier May 2014 post with the help of a good friend, but it strikes me how many of its author's contemporaries have been scrubbed from their platforms, and even the posts it points to are missing in action.¹³ We're lucky to still have access to this more-than-a-decade-old post about a more-than-a-century-old statue.

It was through this memetic publicity campaign that I became aware of this particular sculpture. How many other great works have been excluded from popular consciouseness for lack of a sassy commentary thread on social media?

As an artist, the ironies of publicity were not lost on me as I bowed to the great machine and made a commercial social media account. Instagram enjoyers can follow the account made to accompany my sculpture work: @ryanmakes.ca

I chose the name 'Ryan Makes' at that time because I thought I would humbly blend in with the hundreds of other Ryans who Make. This was a foolish mistake, but resolving identity questions can be surprisingly thorny: Who are you, and who do you want to be, and how do you want the world to relate to you? At the time, I felt like I was misusing every minute I spent on self-discovery instead of putting my focus on making concrete works people could enjoy and purchase.

Not lost is the irony of failing to ask deep questions of myself while working on a piece representing the striving for sovereignty of the individual. It was only many months later when those questions resolved and I came out as Ryan Futures that I became comfortable putting up the final part of Lucifer's installation, the placard which links to this page.

It is not easy to meet oneself! I spent more time developing production techniques than I did on background research anyways. Not that I didn't buy books on John Milton and bookmark tons of essays, I just felt a pressing need to get things right and learning facts didn't seem to be helping.

Getting this Lucifer commission in shape for delivery took months of toil and sacrifice to get right. We pour one out for the printers the good Lord called home during this adventure -- they're printing with the angels now. Here's an example of one of the Lucy development models made during that time:

A small model Lucy made to test parts of the production process.

Here are some experiments in support structures that I broke many stainless steel dental tools excavating:

It is a minor miracle that I was able to get a printable 3D file without travelling to Belgium and making a scan myself. I became intimately familiar with the model I used for this print, a digital master study, and developed a hyper-awareness of the tiny differences from the marble original about which I have deeply bitten my tongue.¹⁴ I hope one day to see the original marble in person so I can document and liberate it into the digital commons. Know anyone who wants to sponsor a trip?

It is another minor miracle that I was able to source the pink PLA plastic Lucifer is 3D printed from in the correct Mallo colour. I ordered every pink I could find for sale until I got a lucky match, then ordered twenty kilograms more. He might have been printed in a hybrid metallic sheen like this development study if the fates had not been so kind:

I did manage to read all of the Sandman and Lucifer graphic novels to keep the fire inside burning while chewing through the problems this project confronted me with.¹⁵ I felt connected to the great artistic tradition of history when I broke my 3D printer and got deeper and deeper into despair as my attempts to repair it made things worse. I learned a lot about myself in that time, and about the properties of plastics and metals, and I also learned how to use a torque wrench.

Ultimately, I was able to deliver Lucifer to his new home where he is enjoyed to this day, and where he may outlive me.

One of the final lighting tests with Little Lucifer after delivering Big Lucifer to his permanent home.

Lucifer turned out great, and I'm eager to place more large installation pieces. If you know anywhere that cries out for cool custom 3D printed sculpture, please reach out to ryan @ futures.love

Intoxicated on the high of Finishing A Project, I took on an even larger project that expanded on Lucifer's success: Putting on a month long art show for a couple decades of my pieces, called Doing The Lord's Work in August 2024. That tale of biting off more than one can chew will have its own page soon. My workhorse Prusa i3 printer will get a page too.

As a final note, a recommendation: to get the full experience of this piece you may wish to order a very strong drink directly in front of Lucifer at the Mallo bar and struggle with yourself in your notebook on questions like Who am I? and Who do I want to be? and What is it all about?

Don't worry if it takes many moons and tears to arrive at answers. That's only natural - even Lucifer is crying, right? When you're ready to talk about it, reach out to invite me and I'll be happy to join you there. :)

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