DryStoneGarden

After Brion I visited Castelvecchio Museum, one of Carlo Scarpa’s other masterpieces, a beautiful restoration of a 14th century castle. Scarpa did a masterful job of revealing the historic architecture while adapting it to its new use as a museum. Like Brion, it’s been written about a great deal; Carlo Scarpa/Museum of Castelvecchio is one example that can be read online. I loved the building, but I was also fascinated by how he displayed the stone sculptures in the museum. I don’t usually pay a great deal of attention to this kind of figurative and religious statuary, but some of the ones at Castelvecchio are particularly expressive and Scarpa did a terrific job of displaying them. Almost every one has some touch from Scarpa to make the piece better. This statue of Jesus is a brilliant composition, immeasurably better because of the window. It’s lit like a Vermeer.

It might be the most anguished single stone I’ve ever seen. Apparently it was originally placed at the entrance to a leprosy hospital, the idea being to remind everyone that no matter how much the people with leprosy might suffer, Jesus suffered more.

Displayed across from the Jesus statue, Scarpa placed a statue of Mary collapsing as she witnesses her son’s suffering. The chiaroscuro lighting, emphasizing her face dropping into shadow and the crumpling S curve of her body, is straight from a Renaissance painting. (more…)

The other thing, along with drawing, that saved Venice for me was going to the Biennale. I hadn’t planned on going, but it was out of the heat and away from the main tourist hordes and in the end I liked it a lot.

I found a lot of the pavilions interesting. Maybe the best was the German exhibition about the Berlin Wall, with a couple of perspective games — isolated panels that from a certain vantage point appeared to be a continuos wall, and a mirror trick that made the wall appear infinite — and genuinely interesting info about the wall’s past and present. I gave it my highest rating, a full Hasselhoff.

But my favorite was the Mexico exhibition: architectural models fabricated in stone and mounted as wall panels. Maybe I’m the exact target audience. Afterwards I found it was completely absent from all of the ‘best of the biennale’ listicles; maybe it’s not flashy enough, there’s a lot of gray and a lot of the same stone. But I think it’s a great series; there’s a nice range of scales, a varying degree of abstraction, and the fabricators used a few different techniques to make the models.

Another half dozen are below. (more…)

Along with Carrara, one of the other places I ended up visiting instead of Florence was Lucca, a town which turned out to be great. I’d never heard of it, but apparently it’s a popular destination; Italy has no end of wonderful places to visit and a couple of my favorite places were ones I’d never heard of beforehand. And instead of seeing David, I got to see a lovely outdoor exhibition of sculptures by Jorge Jimenez Deredia that were scattered throughout Lucca’s old town. Deredia is a Costa Rican sculptor who has lived in Italy since the 70’s. He does a nice job of synthesizing classical and modern, old world and new, figurative and abstract. The most impressive is this one here, which was sited just outside the gate to the old town. It’s huge, hopefully the photos give a sense of its scale.

I think the marble is from the nearby Carrara quarries I showed in my last couple posts. He has studied and had a workshop there, and the stone looks right for Carrara, with lovely flecks of gray mixed into the white marble. There’s a softness and fleshiness to it, really beautiful.

He also works in black granite and bronze. I’m rarely interested in bronzes, but his are great. He credits seeing the Boruca spheres in his native Costa Rica at age nine as the foundational moment of his art, and pretty much everything he does relates to the sphere. From what I can tell, he does three things: curvy women, curvy women interacting with spheres, and quadtychs that show spheres transforming into curvy women. The Lucca exhibition didn’t have any of the complete quadtychs, but the works on exhibit made a nice overview and a fun objective as I pedaled around the town center looking for them.

A couple more are below. His website shows more of his work and includes some worthwhile videos, including two that show the installation at Lucca and one that shows the creation of a large bronze. (more…)

A Continuous Shape from Eyes & Ears on Vimeo.

A great portrait of stonecarver Anna Rubincam as she herself creates a three dimensional portrait in stone. I particularly like seeing the mix of hand and power tools used in the process. The directors talk about the making of the film here.

This is a selection of Jorge Yazpik’s work that was on display inside the museum, an interesting mix with a progression from sculptures to architectural models. I won’t say much about them, which is apparently what he prefers. He doesn’t give titles or explanations or even call out his materials, and in videos talking about his work (in Spanish), he talks about letting people interpret the works however they want, letting them see without predisposition. He says when you listen to music, no one tells you how to listen. So, I guess, just have a listen, take a look. (more…)

While I was in Oaxaca, I got a chance to see an exhibition of sculptures by Jorge Yázpik at the Museo de las Culturas de Oaxaca. I’m not sure how well known he is, but he’s at the top of my list. He does abstract sculpture in several mediums — stone, wood, metal, some kind of polycarbonate — and I’ll show some of the work that was on exhibit inside the museum in a later post, but in this post I want to focus on his large basalts that were outside in the plaza. Really interesting, somewhat hit or miss, but the ones that hit are terrific.

With this one, from a couple of angles it doesn’t look like he has done much to the stone. But then from another angle you can see he carved out the entire heart of the stone, enough that you can climb inside it. I’ve possibly seen something like this in other media, but I can’t think of another sculpture that lets you climb inside a single monolithic stone. People loved posing for photos inside it.

But the one that got me is this one here. It’s not terribly striking at first glance, a dark, vaguely heart-shaped chunk of basalt, roughly the same form that came out of the quarry. But that’s not the sculpture per se, it’s more like the mould for the sculpture.

The sculpture is the void he has carved out, the negative space he made within the stone. In the photo it has a graphic quality, but in person the void is really strong, really three dimensional. He could cast a bronze of it, but he doesn’t need to, it casts the form in your mind.

It does the same thing from the other side. The outer form is a little more compelling from this angle, rising to a prow, but again it’s the negative space that’s the subject, this time with sort of a jack-o-lantern smile. I also like how the stone is wedged with a chunk of rock from the floor of the workshop, seemingly chosen without much care but important enough to be packed with the sculpture and shipped from Mexico City.

I don’t know of anyone else who is this effective at creating negative space within a stone.

This vertical one is also great. It’s more about the overall form, sort of an abstract version of a moai.

The close up has a beautiful geometry, both the polished interior and the natural skin of the stone.

One more is below. (more…)