introduction

ALFI VIVERN
A Silent Dialogue with Stone

Imagined by John Ruskin, Dante's rocks “are of a faded grey, somewhat stained by iron-ochre brown”, and will be carved out by the sculptor's hammer.

Basalt, also known as iron stone (or “cloak stone”) thanks to its “iron-ochre brown” outer layer, has a dark grey core, its soul, that immediately points to the idea of obscurity, emptiness, or depth, but also to an almost religious or even existential contemplation. Basalt, a volcanic rock, is found in extensive deposits in Paraná (Paraná River basin; a million square kilometers of basalt accumulation), the reason why it is also called “Paraná basalt”.

This is not the only material used by Alfi Vivern. His choices range from hard materials to soft ones, from stone carving to metal casting, but his passion seems to be carving the huge Dantean basaltic rock, because it carries a primeval image of an origin that is very distant in time, and for this reason, is infused with history, the memory of the Earth. The layers of the rock must be chipped off and carved into to reveal its core, hard and dark, a metaphor of eternity.

The Vivern family name can be traced back to the 17th century, maybe the 12th. It was the name of a family of blacksmiths from the French region of Béarn and Bigorre (Atlantic Pyrenees and Gascoigne), who crossed Catalonia to arrive in Argentina, Brazil, and Canada. Alfi also started out as an artisan, but always shaping stones, leaving behind his ancestors' anvil to hold on to the chisel; and this is how he shapes himself into the great Brazilian sculptor that he is, even if with a bit of an accent, while sticking to his heritage as a worker of tough materials but, nevertheless, always romancing the stone.

Alfi unveiled the secrets of marble, granite, and basalt, as well as wood and metal. This exhibition is very special. It features smaller pieces but manages to keep a magnitude afforded by the material and by time, reminiscences of primordial rocks.

These pieces demand from us a “mystical” interpretation, like the “memory of a clergyman”, according to Didi-Hubermann, on the work of Ad Reinhardt a mystical remembrance of the history of the Earth, a genesis, a cosmic act of separation of waters so that earth can emerge and light appear an act of demiurgic creation.

First, Heraclites' fire, in a fountain of water and mercury (quick silver) that springs from the rock; links with the alchemical hermeticism of the elements in the cosmogony of the creation of the world: water, air, fire, and earth.

The unhewn stone contrasts with the transparency of water and the specular reflection of mercury which, through fire, burns the air in a primitive liturgical rite; one penetrates a sanctuary, the original mysteries, for which mercury is molten silver, the passive principle, preparing us for reflection and contemplation.

“Just to give a small idea of Mystery”, as Alfi Vivern would say, that is, so that people can penetrate and feel the materials, cross the initiates' portal in a rite of passage.

Inside the myth, a mandala, as if it were a house with many doors whose keys had been all mixed up and time was needed to work it out time to decipher Time.

The mandala is also the expression, or the plastic translation, of a cosmologic concept; it is a plane centered on an axis that gives it a direction, it is the divine cosmos on a flat surface, the sacrificial space, the ritual venue; it is like staking a claim while, at the same time, becoming a transitory temple.

The circle of fire is the circle of knowledge, of the unpredictability of the flame and the stability of matter, followed by shapes that speak of entries and exits, of interior and exterior, of smooth and rough, of up and down, of ephemeral and solid; streamlined volumes in which human work extols the initial materiality of the stone that becomes visible through its irregularities. He explores rough surfaces with their faults and changes these natural data into works in which the archaic memory and the artist's rational project converge. He reminds us of Michelangelo, when he said that from the block of unhewn rock he chipped off what he didn't want and what was left was the sculpture. The work is ready inside the rock; it is enough to cut it open, and from the unhewn rock emerges the polished stone.

The ritual of fire continues, initiated at Faxinal do Céu, in the hinterland of Paraná, in close collaboration with poet Reynaldo Jardim. Fire burns what is temporary and intensifies the shine of what is permanent paper that time turns yellow and is consumed by fire draws attention to the rock as the depository of memory; on the burnt paper remains the part of memory that is lost.

He always highlights his taste for raw materials and his respect for cracks or accidents caused during the extraction of the blocks which, sometimes, leaves the impression that Alfi would like to sign the blocks themselves, or to sign the unhewn rock.

Moving along, we can still see, with a new passage rite as if the statement that the object is inside the rock were not enough that inside the matter there is the idea. Now, he presents us with the relationship between raw matter and finished matter, whose metaphor is the arch and the small stone cubes, the relationship between the natural and the artificial, from where we can surmise that art is artifice, human creation; and so, Malevitch's “black square” becomes a cube, that is, the artificial form by excellence.

These abstract shapes do not have an end in themselves, but rather, they are there as a way of creating an image typical of our time. They seek anonymity, an identification with the “ original egg”, the “cosmogonic egg”, the chaos that is in the origin of heaven and earth, the perfect whole that is similar to an egg; in the orphic cosmogony, because chaos is the origin of the silver egg (a reference to mercury) from which Eros was born.

In searching for the rock's heart he exposes himself. The whiteness and transparency of the marble are classic symbols of artistic perfection, but are also a non-presence. The dark basalt produces more reflections while breaking the quietness of the material. As he strips the basalt, he finds dialogue, a silent dialogue between the artist and Time.

In opposition to the instability of smoke and clouds, metaphor of painting, there is the stability of stone as the symbol of eternity. For Walter Benjamin “the fall of the aura and the petrification of representation are one and the same.”

A stone helmet, a cracked head, a petrified look: the shapes sculpted by Alfi are not a final state, but rather a process of order and disorder, of construction and deconstruction, but never of destruction.

“I am beautiful, Oh mortals! Like a stone dream” (Charles Baudelaire). The “stone dream” of mortals seeking the beauty of the “immortals”, Freud's “unsettling strangeness; the allegory now lends us its figural strength of and we acknowledge the failure of human language. This head wants dialogue, but the dialogue of silence, of the Medusa's petrified look that petrifies everything with her look, the stone head, the static head, “this stone dream, this petrified love like Benjamin's obsessive image touching the allegory <<like the image of petrified restlessness>>” (Christine Bucci-Glucksmann) and this takes us again to his love relationship with the stone. The crack asks for the touch, we have to open it to penetrate its labyrinth, the interior of its eyes, at the grounds of which one finds the Minotaur, memory of knowledge or forgetfulness, of petrification, memory of primitive sculptural shapes like that of the sphinx: “decipher me or I'll devour you!”. From mystical investigations, or even mysterious ones, from time, Alfi takes us to reflections on knowledge.

Contemporary art is born from the standoff between forgetting its history, a kind of amnesia, and its recovery, its recall, the Platonic anamnesis that deals with the immanence of the past in the present the Baudelairean condition of modernity ranging between the transitory or the ephemeral and the eternal, unchangeable, where “metamorphoses are frequent”, has its metaphor in the relationship between paper and stone. Alfi, however, goes further in this search for the eternal in the transitory, which also goes through the “poetic in the historical.”

He shows us the unstable grounds of contemporary sculpting that attempts to rewrite the memory of its past in the present work. Alfi shows us mainly the impossibility of forgetting, once memory is in the matter itself. And so, he reuses all materials as much as possible, from paper and wood, to metal and rock in order to assert, with Deleuze, that “to create is not to communicate, but rather, to resist.”

Closets of memory, closets that store the complexity of the sensitive but which, at the same time, set free the beauty of shape. Paper and wood, metaphors of the ephemeral that fulfill one another in rolls of paper, scrolls of ancient knowledge, kept in wooden closets, which are also likely to disappear owing to their ephemeral nature.

The transitory is, in turn, a metaphor of nomadism, of the voyager or the pilgrim. It is at this point in the exhibit that all its scattered elements start to achieve unity. The anonymity of the unhewn rock is also the non-territory of the nomad, or the non-place of the pilgrim. Alfi is this traveler, or pilgrim, whose mission is to rememorize sculpting, and as such, his place is everywhere, the space of voluntary exiles; but as a nomad, he also has a starting point and a finish line, even if they vary every time: “There is no line separating earth and sky, they are made of the same substance”, said Deleuze.

An obelisk-menir, ready to go, is the essence of this pilgrim for whom the stone is at the same time utensil and food, now represented by the stone-bread inside the “lunch box” of the physical worker, it is the space of the sign with a few references to the real, metaphor of the artistic work itself, of the sculptor's job in his disordered state of thing.

In this respect, Alfi Vivern's work is mythical, for it presents itself in its original state, in its “egg” state, the founding myth, or in Hesiod's words: “the myth of the world's original state.”

Getting in touch with sensitivity, this is the cosmogonic point of Alfi, the sculptor. The affinity he finds between matter and life reveals the organic cosmogony of both, so important in Eastern cultures, but which he manages to transform based on the platonic idea of pure shape, that looks for previous wisdom, some sort of first-hand wisdom, which is the wisdom of the rock.

His mythical thought goes beyond abstraction as he seeks a space in which to confer greater poetical power to his materials, but never does he prevent a rock from being a rock. For Alfi, sculpting is something to be experienced first-hand, and not just to be observed.

Fernando A. F. Bini
History of Art Professor and Art Critic
February 2003