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Alberto Replanski.com |
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Alberto Replanski.com |
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Alberto Replanski with his award winning 9/11 Firefighter's Memorial In Baton Rouge |
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This is Albertos Memorial Site 1939 - 2008 |
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To contact us: |
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Phone: 604-448-1294 E-mail: dreplans@gmail.com |
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An endless construction: not the hyperbole that extols a work of monumental dimensions nor an expansive gesture that knows no limit, but the work of beginning, the work of the beginning as such. There are unfinished pieces made poignant by the image of an historical accident or an abrupt end, discernible as the effects of an interruption. Others, like Kafka's novels, would seem unfinished by dint of an inner logic, as though their very structure made completion impossible and even undesirable: something, the obsessive impulse to revise or rebuild, an intellectual honesty at odds with the complacency and violence of the completed, makes them, for us, unfinishable. Alberto Replanski's "Endless Construction", and his late, unfinished work in general, falls under this second category. Describing an outward, radial movement - the long, marble piece that erupts beyond the bulk of the other elements, the rough, beak-like component frozen tangentally to the central, circular blade, pointing forward - the work's pieces are simultaneously drawn inwards, as though arrested in place by the force of a secret gravity inherent to their displacement. Rather than offer us the spectacle of graceful, organic growth, the work strikes the eye as a desperate improvisation governed by implacable laws of attraction and encumbered by the heavy materiality of the components, the slow, painstaking advance of a wheel that accumulates objects around its outer rim, only to lose them again, in its advance. Like the other pieces still in his studio and which would seem to constitute a series, "Endless Construction" is a precarious assembly of sculptured marble, wooden forms and dismembered machine components, most of which have not been attached to one another or secured to a base. We can assume this was but a transitory stage of their construction, but there is much to be said about these fragile and "open" works. They appear to me as pieces still trying to find their element, as the vanishing mediator between the elegant, geometric abstractionism of earlier, public sculptures and a new, riskier, rawer fusion of metal and stone, still unborn. For me, there is no more fitting tribute to Alberto Replanski than to regard "Endless Construction" in this light: the late and last attempt of an artist to begin anew, to reinvent himself, to discard the sefl-satisfied stability of the known and opt for the frail beauty of the new.
By Adrian Replanski. |
