Love doesn’t hurt at all in the woodland grove where Joana Vasconcelos has constructed a giant wedding cake. Cupids balance playfully on pedestals, water spurts from the mouths of dolphins and little statues of St Anthony bless newlyweds all around the tiled circumference of her 12m tall sculpture. Kitsch and beautiful, absurd and captivating, this may be the first wholeheartedly joyful artistic masterpiece of the 21st century.
You can go inside, passing between the electric candles and ceramic mermaids, to find a domed circular wedding chapel that pulses with bright colours, twisty columns and even more jaunty figures. This is a building with the irresponsibility of a work of art. You climb the stairs to the higher tiers of the “cake”, and find yourself suddenly above the trees in an impossibly light and heady place.
Vasconcelos may have had the idea when tipsy, for she apparently enjoys Château Lafite Rothschild. The Portuguese sculptor’s colossal yet effervescent new work is part of an ongoing relationship of artist and patron with Lord Rothschild. It rises up in the rambling, roly-poly estate of Waddesdon Manor, created by the Rothschild family in the 19th century. A short walk from Wedding Cake is her previous work here, Lafite, in which two towers of cascading, bulging gothic fun are constructed from emptied magnums of Château Lafite Rothschild – one of the world’s most renowned and expensive wines.
Wedding Cake takes the hedonistic excess of Lafite’s cascading pinnacles of wine bottles to a whole new level – or rather layer – of cake-like delectability. As in a real wedding cake made by a top baker, it’s the details that take your breath away and make you smile. Here, the effect of glistening icing is created by glazed ceramics. The colours, too, resemble icing: pale greenish blue, delicate pink, a golden summit, all set against sugar-white.
Vasconcelos made her name at the 2005 Venice Biennale with The Bride, a graceful, colossal chandelier made from 25,000 tampons. Wedding Cake is a sequel – but instead of being assembled from found stuff, such as tampons and wine bottles, it is meticulously crafted. What all her works have in common is a true sculptor’s feel for the strangeness of physical space: Wedding Cake at first sight isn’t as gargantuan as I hoped yet as you walk around it, go inside and climb the stairs it seems to expand. I half-expected the circular platforms to start rotating as I stood on them, dolphins, mermaids, putti and all.
Wedding Cake is at once a garden folly, in the tradition of random pleasure-buildings in landscaped gardens, and a joke about the folly-like nature of Waddesdon Manor itself. The house – built by Ferdinand de Rothschild, who bought this estate near Aylesbury in 1874 – is a French-style chateau on the summit of a high hill enfolded by landscaped woods, approached by steep paths through rockeries. This fairytale place was built to house Ferdinand’s art collection and host weekend parties; the future Edward VII and his mistresses were frequent guests. Queen Victoria also came, and was so impressed by the innovative electricity she kept asking for the lights to be switched on and off. The interiors are a French fantasy land stuffed with 18th-century panelling and tapestries, rare porcelain and paintings by Watteau and Gainsborough.
Wedding Cake pays homage to this Victorian party house by playing host to modern parties. You can get married in it. And the carnival frolics of its teeming surfaces promise all kinds of weddings, far from convention or tradition. It’s a temple to human joy, a tower of love.
A sculpture standing in a grove in a vast park has to “cold call” people who chance on it, establish itself as art without the setting of a museum to help. Wedding Cake immediately entertains the eye and then fills your mind and heart. The lovingly created abundance of detail has you floating on air, enjoying the sensual rush of glistening colours and images. Dreams become real.
In the house at the top of the hill are models for more serious Rothschild architectural projects including the National Library of Israel, designed by Herzog & de Meuron and opening in Jerusalem later this year. All good architecture is gratuitous, its beauty a preposterous addition to the world: a library and a walk-in wedding cake are expressions of the same imaginative impulse that made Ferdinand de Rothschild build a French chateau on an English hill.
Joana Vasconcelos: Wedding Cake is at Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire, from 18 June, tours available to 26 October.
