My Ayrton

Those who see the original version of "Nosso Senna" – the life-sized bust of Ayrton – immediately recognize the aspirations of a well-known chapter in Western art: the inspiration drawn from Greco-Roman sculpture with its quest for verisimilitude, the theme of immortalizing the hero, and the recognition of a face represented in what is not skin.

Rare, however, and possibly unprecedented in the history of art, is that a bust is born from a conversation between two mothers. Or, to put it definitively, from the pact between one mother cradling a memory and another, her granddaughter, experiencing the creative potential of a new life.

For the past 30 years, Dona Neyde Senna has carefully organized the image archives of her son Ayrton Senna's Memorial. Accustomed to seeing tributes to her son, she couldn’t hide her desire to see a sculpture that, in her eyes, would have the highest fidelity to the face of her beloved “Beco,” as she knew him intimately. In 2014, Neyde made a decision: she turned to her granddaughter, Lalalli Senna, who was building a career in the visual arts.

Finding the right expression required Lalalli to spend hours upon hours searching through the photographic archives of the Memorial. Later, the initial creative process in a digital platform was abandoned due to unsatisfactory results. It was only in the malleability of plastiline that Lalalli began to shape the Ayrton she had in her memory, with her hands discovering the not always obvious features of the three-time world champion in the photos: the athletic neck, the firm chin, and even the slightly uneven lips, the result of a viral paralysis the driver contracted in 1985 before his debut with Lotus.

It was funny that my grandmother was satisfied more quickly than I was, Lalalli recounts. She didn’t want me to keep going, because she feared something would be lost. But I was only convinced when I was already working on the expanded project, which came to be called Nosso Senna. At that time, Lalalli was still racing against the clock; besides having a scheduled move to the United States, she was carrying another creation: her first child, already in the last weeks of gestation.

The work received wide approval from the Senna family, and especially from Dona Neyde. However, the first bronze replica of the sculpture did not remain in São Paulo, where the matriarch resides, but instead went to the Vatican.

The suggestion to gift the bust to Pope Francis, known for his passion for sports, came from the Italian banker Gian Claudio Giovannone, representative of the Ayrton Senna Institute in Europe, and was promptly accepted. On April 18, 2019, on the Thursday of that Easter Week, the Argentine pontiff received from the hands of Bianca Senna (Lalalli's sister) the green-yellow helmet and the bust, which underwent another test: it was quickly recognized by pedestrians in line at St. Peter's Square and by Vatican security, who soon expedited the passage of the tributes. Today, listed in the contemporary collection of the Vatican Museums, alongside pieces from renowned (and still very masculine) names like Van Gogh, Marc Chagall, and Pietro Ruffo, “Meu Ayrton,” which was the first step in the celebrated “Nosso Senna,” can be described as an extraordinarily unique work in memory of the genius of motorsport, born from a gesture of doubly maternal love.