Sculpture (18)
Genesis
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
Archeo Laylines
cm.74x62 - 14 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
Silk & Bamboo
cm.88x54 - 25 deep - 1998
This piece has a unique history.
Working with clay is enormously satisfying for the pliability and versatility of the material.
But it has its own limitations. If one wants to do something that goes beyond a limiting compactness for the intended composition, the material starts falling apart not having any self supporting properties, at that point it needs an armature.
So, wanting to explore more extended forms I started playing with bamboo canes searching for a less contained proposition. Then in order to fill in the vacant spaces within the newly elaborated structure I resorted to normal surgery gauze drenched in molten wax.
Hence the title, but in order not to be too reductive the gauze became a nobler silk, evoking then some subtle Zen quality.
The freedom afforded by this working method gave me the opportunity for flights of the imagination, creating what now appears as some kind of exploding tower, complete with projected cantilever.
In fact it could be seen as an innovative and daring project for a fabulous skyscraper for some extravagant middle eastern oil tycoon in search of celebrity and wanting to do it better and fancier then anyone of his equally noble and enlightened competitors.
Beware! The architect inside is always lurking for an opportunity to take off, and seek vindication!
However, not having ever had any Maecenas like patronage for large scale follies, one was forced to stick to a sculpted domestic size object, which though, as often is the case, it’s crying out for a monumental dimension, whereas the current bronze cast presentation gives the piece further emphasis to its exuberant potential.
Giorgio Attilio Ceccarelli
Amphora
cm.39x55,5x26 - 1996
The broken vessel lay at the bottom of the Tuscan Tyrrhenian sea, twenty meters down, gently caressed by the sea grass lightly waving by the flux of constant undercurrents.
Fully geared up for diving, amazed by the accidental finding and with some trepidation, I was admiring the relic of a great ‘orcio’, an ancient roman jar used for oil or wine transport, almost man size.
Not far from it was the amphora.
Both wounded victims of some ancient shipwreck, rested in the golf or Baratti, under the fortified village of Populonia, high up on top of the sea-facing proud hill-brow … in the ancient land of the Etruscans, where my remote ancestors wrought their future.
The water was clear and the glittering with nested rims of oval light, refracted down from the waves above, wavering restless over the old artefacts, that gave their perpetual immobility the semblance of some animation, even hope for the future.
The terracotta amphora, fastened to the sea bottom, was gaping open and irreparably fractured, aggrieved with sediments of sea moss and sand, yet encrusted with barnacles.
It gave a strong impression of quiet and resigned acceptance of its enduring misfortune.
Years later working in the studio with wax and fire, when I was searching for inspiration and seeking a convincing form, from its remote meanders, unexpected, memory struck-back with the images of an orphan, broken amphora, forgotten by centuries, and in need of proper mending.
So with patient work the wounds were healed by the daring inclusion of definite flat plates, intersecting its rotund convexity with occlusive planes.
The full roundness of the original feminine form remaining only an illusion, worth previous recollections of things way past.
Finally, cast in immortal bronze, the amphora sits well reconciled with fate, contented and rested on its strong tripod, now looking to the posterity, for a long, long tome to come.
Giorgio Attilio Ceccarelli