cm. 69x56 - 20 deep - 1983

For those of us unfortunate enough to be living in Rome, the incumbency of antiquity is a burden quite difficult, almost impossible for some to shake. 

We live in a city where the Cloaca Maxima is still an integral working component of the city infrastructure, where some of the roman aqueducts are still working and performing their duties bringing fresh waters to town, and where the longest living working building in western history is still intact, majestic in its perfect still beauty, and in absolute order as a place of cult and crowded visitors … the mighty Pantheon.

Rome is the place where whenever one tries and thinks of whatever might want to appear as new, the same soon turns out tainted by the tinge of traces connecting to something very old, remote, stayed with the opacity of the defunct, against the staggering reality of magnificent, potent, breathtaking ruins.

It’s happened here over and again. 

We have to learn to live, since childhood, with the obsession of the past, bearing dawn on us as heavy load, borne on our shoulders like Atlas’ world. 

Vice versa our contemporary built environment and architecture are shocking, abysmal, just as the even worse planning system that produced them, for lack of imagination with integrity, pristine daring with profound civic sense, degraded by the lack of morals and aesthetic composure, with the necessary restraints. 

In many cases just the product of sheer, shameless incompetence.

During the recent past, the miraculous post war period, this city has been built by mental dwarves, on top of layers of cadavers, still neatly stacked away into orderly beehives inside the many deep catacombs. The sense of death is pervasive everywhere. One feels as if  walking on the remains of decay, mingled with wafts of urine boiled in the heat of summer within what’s left of ancient monuments, frequently bequeathed with the graffiti from hordes of stupid vandals, ignorant tourists, the new barbarians.

Not surprising then that blimps of nostalgia for the glorious past may flash through our minds when trying to connect to one’s inner resources, in search of an inspiration for new work.

This piece of high-relief sculpture falls just into that category of unexpected surgings,  that impromptu materialize before one’s inner eyes, suddenly in search of confirmation into proper and fulfilling expression.

With this piece the ghosts of ancient ruins mixed up with a sense of the feminine rotund landscapes, earth, deep waters, tumuli, traces of strong built forms, cavernous secretes of yet undiscovered subterranean relics, the psychic mummies from the distant past … that all together conjure up suggestions of mingling images, that chasing wildly and incoherent after one another, in the melting pot of one’s being, then after trial, tribulation, error and ecstasy, take eventually their final form, and shape into a consolidated proposition … that in the end quenches the turmoil inside. 

Your own personal fantastic landscape has thus come to being, borne out of an antiquity existent in imagination only, that you might be bearing within yourself from ions before, implanted there by one of your own earlier lives, in the process of evolution, maybe, and well scored in the mystery of the soul’s deepest layers. 

As in many other cases, years later the almost forgotten plaster-cast, covered with dust, and in need of some repair, finally obtained new life after being eventually cast in bronze, and with that acquiring new dignity and the prospect for a long, long existence. 

Hopefully still capturing the curiosity and firing the imagination of the beholder.

Giorgio Attilio Ceccarelli