In some ways our generation is possibly the luckiest ever.
For millennia mankind has been looking up into the skies searching for knowledge, inspiration, signs for faith and future, confidence in orientation, auspicial constellation alignments, fortune telling, confirmation of self value, assertion of own political or religious power on earth, and who knows what else still.
But our generation now has much more. We have Hubble. Floating there, high in outer space, scrutinizing the universe for us and rendering us the images of the unthinkable, of the unimaginable, of the infinitely beautiful, magnificent, unintelligible, moving cosmic colourful space we float in, almost in total ignorance of its essence.
No scientist dares postulating what really happened at the very instant of the Big Bang, but they are telling us that moments later whatever was started expanding and still is doing so, at an ever increasing rate. Like the exploding lights of festive fireworks.
Genesis is an artistic idea of the beginning of all things to be.
From the initial spark, and from a nucleus of primordial motion, clouds of cosmic dust, matter and energy were flung away in all directions, creating time with movement, and all which will ignite the evolution of countless new mysteries.
One could possibly then argue that my Genesis - in a bronze-cast-high-relief - tries and give material substance, in suspended animation, to the owe of contemplating what never will we be able to fully comprehend, ourselves being just only part, an occasional by-product, of that cosmic dust.
But it’s not so simple, contemplation of the universe never in fact was, at the beginning, the conscious object of my sculptor’s doing.
At the starting point one may wander in serendipity, ambling and searching for a lead, for the gleam of an inspiration. With no precise aim one begins the endeavour by trial, rejection and subsequent adjustments, endlessly, till the time comes when from the depths of the subconscious, the light of an intuition of theme and form begins to take shape, conjuring up an idea so as to give life and energy to one’s motivation for modelling the clay with progressive enthusiasm.
Finally after such protracted efforts a piece of work may come to its completion.
Only at that point you begin to discover what you think you might have done.
The title comes as a temporary consequence, some sort of armistice between your lingering uncertainties and the product of your labour, maybe yet to be finished, or as a plausible proposition only in search for an explanation no one requires.
But truth and meaning lie in the eyes of the beholder, they can see in your work thing you never imagined. That’s the ultimate beauty of this work method.
One very distinguished and mature lady once told me that she saw, in what I now call Genesis, the image of a running horse that made her hear and feel the thudding of hooves on a distant solid ground, like some prairie, or the Hungarian Puszta!
How great … that’s Art!
Giorgio Attilio Ceccarelli