Tahar Ben Jelloun

If I talk to you in legends and parables
it is because they are sweeter to hear. Horror
cannot be spoken about as it is alive and living,
as it is silent and moves on
seeping into the day, seeping into our sleep,
drop by drop,
painful remorse.

Giorgio Seferis,
(On board newspaper II)

Here I talk in parables, I hobble
and stammer as poets do: and in truth, I am ashamed
that I still have to be a poet.

Nietzsche
(thus spoke Zarahustra)

The period is yearning for a little more mystery; for unfinished phrases, gratuitous gestures, ambiguous thoughts, mazelike routes. The kingdom of images and changing colours. Men, dominated by the dictatorship of objects, need to get a bit of fresh air, not the air that travel and holiday agencies supply, but the air they may find in a corner of their memory. Take a distance, from things. Move away. Follow the evanescent path that donkeys have marked out. Move around but do not have an exact destination in mind, love laziness, the memory. Do not give a name to things for fear of destroying them. Love the word, develop it so as to protest against the spoken language that is becoming a skeleton, take care of the symbol, develop it so as to protest against the dreary cage that the world of objects, produced and consumed for the community, is becoming: A network of formulas and stereotypes. Opaque and inadequate. Only useful. To be utilized in order to serve impatience and calculating time. Only what is needed to exchange concise information or to pretend. Stylishness is considered to be a grin, a precious thing behind which emptiness would disguise itself. As far as art is considered, it has been closed inside museums and galleries; poetry has been closed inside printed books that have remained uncut.
Why don’t we speak to each other using proverbs any more, quoting myths, through symbols? Are we still able to retrieve a homeland and a tradition that enhance the incisiveness of a gesture, that reveals itself to us in its bare significativeness?
A touch of disillusionment and desperation transpires from the artist’s work. The artist creates so as to express to others his diverse way of perceiving. His diversity, is a diversity that brings him closer to all those people who make up the crowd that haunt and betray him.
The artist does not create for them but among them and with them. He plunges into their alienation, he appears on the screen of their loneliness in an arrogant way. What unites him to them is, first of all, exactly what separates him from them. It is his way of expressing himself that produces the non resemblance. The diversity is his identity. Therefore, communicating means, as far as the artist is concerned, to push himself so far over there that his diversity is perceived. The artist lives his own diversity as the wound gradually moves ahead inside a body, a consciousness, as the local and general anaesthetic of the crowd is gradually given out daily. The artist trusts the equivocal, his tremulous ability to convey some signs in their nudity, in their limits, and faces up to the remaining ones, very few.
The remaining signs, bound and used up go on surviving.
The artist is all that he lacks, what is lacking makes up his starting point, his route and his objective. All that he creates is what he is in want of. Exposure. Declare the limits. Frame the incomprehensible gestures. Frame them inside an irate memory, discover shame and a touch of desperation.
Sculpture is closer to desperation than any other form of art and leads the artist to admitting a sense of powerlessness: the sculptor’s work is an unsustainable denial of our incapacity to gather the essential subtleties that are to be transferred into all that one creates, when directly competing with God, creator.
The first sculptor’s in Greek and Roman mythology imitated Gods, competing with the Divine, that is something that man was not sure even existed.
Myths overlapped and contradicted each other around the ability to create, to construct with their hands, to invent machines and devices Prometheus moulded the man of clay, Daedalus constructed the maze and created wings in wax for his son, Icarus and himself in order to escape from that very maze watched over by Tálos, a twofold myth about a sculptor and a sculptress, “the last of the bonze warriors” He is both Héphaistos’s father and son: in the myth, Vulcan, the Roman God of Fire.
Tálos, posted by Zeus as the guardian of Crete, the island of Europe was nothing but an animated
sculptor. His body was metallic and conducted red hot heat. Whenever Tálos had to face up to someone he leapt into the fire, embraced his opponent, thus burning him alive. Tálos was invulnerable, except in one spot and Arganaut Póias knew just where to strike and killed him.
Daedalus therefore got away from Tálos by flying up in the air.
But Tálos tells us another myth about Daedalus, both nephew and pupil as wellwho was killed by his master out of jealousy as he had become so skilled.
But why are so many myths mentioned when looking at Sciavolino’s works? Sciavolino’s sculpture has passed through many different stages. What links it to them is the never-ending calling on old and new myths, the continual study of myths that venture into creation and compete with God.
When he observes and then quotes all the events that have marked the history of humanity and particularly after the Greek-Roman period, Sciavolino laughs and I laugh as well, as sculpture has given us so much more information about models of equilibrium and ideals of perfection and beauty than about the world which put forward those ideals and models. It is for this reason that myths come to our aid as they are unexplainable and contradictory. And this is why, alternatively we can admire , or at least look at that sculpture that moves away from the significance, the sense. What the human being does not expect to explain to me is his/her relationship with the world itself. The temptation may be, therefore, the sculptor’s contradiction, “abstract” that is impossible: rather possible when “abstract” means intentionally moving awa from the event that man may remember in his relationship with nature.
The bet of a sculptor carrying out research is fiery, just like Sciavolino’s that is, to try not to “express” anything voluntarily, be there, in complete absurdity, connecting up to the world again only through his presence that does not wish to express a “message”, that does not have a metaphysical or even a subdued moral, not even when doing or behind a window pane.
I have always been a bit cool as far as sculptors are concerned, who want to convey a meaning into each one of their works, even though I respect and respect them for their ability as we are talking about monumental works at times! When I visited “Rodin Museum” I realized how much that man had had to struggle and suffer in order to accomplish those forms and each time he desired to to understand man. I am convinced, however, that I do not need sculptors in order not to understand man or not to understand the world. On the other hand I greatly admire Tinguely, the German-Swiss sculptor who died a few years ago. He attracts me as he realized that the world is a machine and the event is a small wheel of a machine that turns and stops at times on this or that and in that way sparks off an endless haphazard like a cataclysm.
This is why I like Jean Tinguely’s machines as they demonstrate every day that there is no point in showing beauty or ugliness but it is better to portray unknown things, mysterious things such as a chain of subsequent events. I’m referring to exceptional machines going from A to Z, dreadful.
Sciavolino is not removed from the mystery game, he loves following a chain of events, even though in a different way. And we also have some affinities of taste in common as far as these pursuits are concerned: Moreover, Sciavolino is the only sculptor, as far as I know, who has shared with me an interest in the research and even through my words, carried out and tackled with the same courage that can be found in the game, by Giacometti: annul the human and animal body in sculptor, as in drawing and in painting.
When we look at “the man who is walking” or the dog, we can see the sketch of a sketch of a body that is walking; there is nothing else, he decided that there was no point in re-creating beautiful bodies, showing parts that are extremely visible, wonderful bodies that signify themselves
Rodin no, Rodin produced some big bottoms. Giacometti did not try to represent man and to talk about him, he tried to express human desperation through desperation and fleshing. The only person that he tried to portray was his brother, Diego. It is not one of Giacometti’s works that I particularly like whereas I like his portrait paintings; they are portraits produced in an indirect way. He did not search for resemblance but he searched for inner depth by utilizing the same stripping process that he used in sculpture, inside the face, inside the body, behind the face, behind the head of anyone who sat for the portrait. This is an interesting fact.
Uranus and Geo’s daughter, Mnemosyne met Zeus for nine consecutive nights. At the end of this period the nine Muse were born. The nine Muses were invested with Ardalo’s protection, who was son of Héphaistos’s son, who was the most electrical and versatile sculptor of mythical antiquity. Ardalo passed on the most amazing stories about his father, Héphaistos, that often seem not to have any apparent meaning, such as constructing an invisible net to imprison Aphrodite who had committed adultery with Ares and invited the Gods of Olympus to the event. Héphaistos made a throne with belts…safety to get his revenge on his mother who had had him flung down from Olympus. Hera sat there remaining imprisoned. Héphaistos was called back to Olympus to set her free. Dionysus was able to convince him to climb up but he had to get him drunk. Héphaistos rode up to Olympus on a donkey.
Just as electrical and versatile as Ardalo, Sciavolino has always preserved something that is unmistakable in each one of his various stages but it is difficult to individualize the exact connection. It is certainly not the sense of classicism even though there is a great deal of classicism.
First of all I noticed and right from the initial works the amazing sense of movement, it conveys the movement of beings and things rather than things and beings and man’s gradual disequilibrium. Realism is camouflaged and there are not any pleonasms; in equilibrium and in disequilibrium. “The Hanged” could be rags, or someone who is going up and down on a seesaw. But in fact, they are, in truth, hanged persons. His disguises are extremely semantically rich and the significance cannot be reached, that is it is practically impossible or unperceivable to reach as Sciavolino possesses amazing manual and poetical ability.
Today his works are not as interesting as the ones that he produced in the 60’s. I would probably have been beside him during that period when he struggled so hard to try and give a meaning to the fight against violence, war, mutilation and men’s wounds: The commitment. Let’s look at one of his works where the sickle and the hammer are present. It refers to Picasso (Homage to Picasso). You may find it slightly bitter and ironic as it was realized in 76. Today it is not something that you would keep as representative of the artist, only his way of behaving.
They are symbols that come back again and again in other works, in other periods as well, but they seem like oddities today, even though they make us realise that the artist asks himself questions time and again so as to find his constructed sense of perspective, driven, I believe by kindness. There is a touch of irony directed towards Marx’s large head but it is placated with affection.
Let’s have a look at “The Question” now. It reminds me of a work entitled, “The Dinner” by the Chilean painter, Claudio Bravo, portraits of real persons coming from the Arabian and Muslim world. When he exhibited his canvasses at the Malborough gallery in New York his personalities and his loves were rebuked. The choices he made may be exploited so as to provoke.
“The Question” is an important work: you must see it. It is one of the most interesting: unfathomable: It’s difficult to understand why. However, each single element is charged with irony, passion, symbolism, care, violence. Each element acts as a model as well. And this is, in fact, the main theme in Sciavolino’s works which may be called, but not in “cultural” terms, a form of all-engaging eclectism. It corresponds to a wealth of amazing inspirations.
But his last works attract me the most, starting from the Sarcophagus in Swiss stone pine that will remain one of the artist’s most expressive works. There is a skilful transformation as regards things, over the last few years. There is a smile, the colours, the fresh fig in a hand carved in marble, just like Magritte, it becomes the mechanics of a game, a poetical joke, it renders homage of irony and pleasure to ordinary every day objects, objects that are to be looked at and considered.
Humorism of stones is a bird re-cut out in the ocean and a woman sculpt in a piece of wood; laugh about the colour, about the precision of the sky, scandal of triviality and a break down in the memory placed as a presentiment on a slab in front of the sea.
Mystery is the absolute refinement of reality. The thought fails each time it tries to “describe” that
reality. At the most it relates some tales. Beauty no longer keeps to recognizing but making a new and original use of the glance.
I believe you have to touch the marble works so as to get to know them. There may be a more difficult relationship between the artificer and the marble compared with clay, wood and metals. I would like to ask Sciavolino an intimate question: How did he feel when he passed over to marble? It was a necessary change in order to get to coloured pieces: they are, in a certain sense, a vital novelty: Sciavolino enjoys realizing them. He nearly always enjoys himself and this is the best thing you can say about him. The material no longer confines him, the poetical game has become easier. Limits help: painful and secluded relationships tend to move elsewhere more easily. The poetical grandness unites or identifies itself when reaching maturity with the confidence that one has the ability to create.