LostWord

Janez Pirnat (1932–2021) was a Slovenian sculptor, draughtsman and graphic artist, born in Ljubljana on 25 September 1932. He took his first art education from his father, the painter and sculptor Nikolaj Pirnat, then studied with Jakob Savinšek and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana between 1953 and 1959.

He worked in stone and bronze for sixty years — modernist abstract forms, public works across Slovenia, sculpture in conversation with architecture. He spent the last decade of his life on the Croatian island of Brač, working alongside his wife Sandra Nejašmić Pirnat, also a sculptor.

Brač is a stone island. Marble has been quarried there for two thousand years; the white limestone of the Diocletian Palace in Split, of parts of the White House in Washington, was cut from it. Pirnat carved on the same rock he lived on, working in his eighties.

Robert Smith has told this story in several interviews around the album release. He had been gifted a monograph of Pirnat's work some time before. Flipping through it, he came across an image of Bagatelle and felt the stone belonged on the record he was making.

He looked Pirnat up online to ask permission. He learned that Pirnat had died that same day.

Smith reached Pirnat's widow, Sandra Nejašmić Pirnat, and asked. She gave permission — and then sent him the sculpture itself. The stone is now in Smith's home.

This is a coincidence the piece refuses to explain. It is mentioned where it is mentioned: as a fact about an album cover.

The cover art was developed by Andy Vella, the Cure's long-time cover designer (working with the band since the early 1980s, with Porl Thompson as Parched Art for much of that span), alongside the graphic designer Ben Parker. Smith brought the photograph and the brief; Vella shaped the image; Parker did the 3D mapping work that lets the sculpture animate on the deluxe edition as a slow, lit asteroid turning in deep space.

Vella has handled almost every Cure cover from Seventeen Seconds (1980) onward. Disintegration (1989), Bloodflowers (2000), 4:13 Dream (2008), and the new record share his hand-and-paint-and-photograph idiom — this one closer to Faith (1981) than to Disintegration's torn-collage register. The chosen object does most of the work.

Lost World is the third piece in BeSides — a small catalog of album-cover lifts. It takes the deluxe-edition animation literally: a stone form, slowly turning, in deep space, audible.

What we are not doing: we are not reproducing Pirnat's sculpture. We do not have a verified scan, and we will not invent one. The form on screen is an abstraction in the spirit of his stone work — mass, weight, restraint. The actual Bagatelle is on the record cover, and on Smith's shelf.

What we are doing: making the album's own moment audible. The music is in A minor, at about 100 BPM — the key and tempo Robert Smith and the band sit "Alone" in. The harmonic motion is the song's stated chord scheme — G · F · Am · Dm — held under long pads and a single, repeating bass figure, with the kit kept off so the room stays quiet. None of it is "Alone." All of it is from the same neighborhood.

Three things this piece sits next to without insisting on:

One. The cover is a portrait of someone else's work. Smith brought a stranger's sculpture to a record about loss. The cover credit is Pirnat first. Vella and Parker are listed below, where they did their work.

Two. A widow gave a sculpture away. Sandra Nejašmić Pirnat is also a sculptor. She didn't sell the stone to a rock band; she sent it to him. The gesture is in the record now.

Three. The synchronicity belongs to Robert Smith. We don't get to interpret it. We tell the fact and step back.