"Melting" Carved Mookaite Jasper Skull Sculpture — L'Aquart × Luis Alberto Quispe Aparicio

A skull that appears to be melting — a lapidary visual pun carved in mookaite jasper. One of one.

The object

"Melting" is Quispe Aparicio's pun on the word itself: a skull caught mid-liquefaction, sliding like a dropped sundae across a hot sidewalk. The mookaite's natural swirl of cream, caramel, cocoa and red obligingly reads as vanilla, coffee and chocolate slathered in butterscotch and strawberry, and the carved base continues the joke with rivulets of the same ooze running down one side.

The counterpoint

The pleasure of the piece is the collision it stages — hard and soft, sweet and macabre, dessert and death — set deliberately against one another. It is no accident of the stone but a fully intended exercise in thematic counterpoint: the series' wit at its most literal.

The stone

Mookaite is a jasper — an opaque, iron-rich variety of chalcedony (microcrystalline quartz) — whose mineral inclusions produce its characteristic bands of red, ochre, cream and mauve. It registers close to 7 on the Mohs scale and takes a high polish that deepens the play of color across the carved surface. No two faces of the material repeat, which is precisely what lets a single block stand in for a whole sundae of flavors.

The series — Faces of Eternity

Few symbols carry the universal recognition or the suggestive charge of the skull: archetype and memento mori, relic and warning, calavera and battle trophy, the seat of personality and the face of eternity. "Faces of Eternity" is Quispe Aparicio's answer to that long iconography — a set of skulls, each carved from a different natural gemstone, given attitude and personality: a wink at mortality rather than a solemn bow to it. The concept took several years simply to gather rough of sufficient size, interest and integrity to carve, then a year at the bench, each skull requiring one to three months and its own hand-fabricated supporting metalwork. The completed collection toured the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) headquarters in Carlsbad, California; the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, in "Gem Artists of North America"; and the Lizzadro Museum of Lapidary Art in Illinois.

The artist

Luis Alberto Quispe Aparicio is a Peruvian-born lapidary sculptor and creative director of L'Aquart, heir to a family atelier whose tradition reaches back to 1968. An engineer by training, he gave the bench what engineering could not match; his carved works are held in museum collections worldwide, and since 2010 he has collaborated with S.T. Dupont on Haute Création pieces. His practice insists on harmony between lapidary carving, metalwork and structural planning — and on refusing difficulty as a reason not to proceed.

Offered by

Surround Art & Diamonds — North American representative of L'Aquart — presents this work as a singular object at the intersection of lapidary art, fine craft and collecting, with nearly a decade placing Quispe Aparicio's sculptures in private collections across the United States and Europe.

• Material: Mookaite jasper (Madagascar); vermeil metalwork
• Dimensions: 16 × 15 × 13 cm (6.3 × 5.9 × 5.1 in)
• Year: 2017
• Artwork origin: Peru
• Edition: Unique, one of one
• Status: In hand, available