If you are a believer you believe in God, if you are not you believe in gravitational force – the death of God is a point of departure, like a springboard for a leap, for a creative impetus
Cesare Cunaccia in conversation with Charles Ray
Charles Ray hides his mystery under a veil of cordiality laced with detached humor. As unsettling as his way of making art, which, after the abstract beginnings, performance and body art of the 1980s, prefers figuration but which at the bottom has little that is figurative, conceptually contravening the plastic and sometimes monumental texture of his figures.
All his previous experience and a layered semantic summa become subtraction and nuclear projection in the contours of those Martian sculptures of his, never static, sibylline and isolated by even disturbing intermittences.
Eleonora de Yougoslavie, Silvia Gaspardo Moro and Charles Ray
His calm narration during the vernissage of the Paris exhibition dedicated to him last year, was as if it floated on air and he was talking about something that concerned him. Rather than explaining or giving information and readings, he was inducing further curiosity and slight dis- quiet.
The same as that declared by the provost of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés church, where Ray had been dragged by his friend Eleonora de Yougoslavie, in the company of his wife Silvia. Silvia Gaspardo Moro, a graphic designer from Turin with art studies behind her, transplanted to London and then between California and New York, is Charles’ alter ego in his exhibition adventures around the globe.
«Charlie is a runaway train-affirms-impossible to keep up with him. Someone should make a book, the title we already have, God only knows about his religious production of the last twenty years. Charlie discusses every detail, everything, I am like his mirror. He asks me for opinions and confirmations, but he does what he likes and what he decides from the beginning».
Sleeping Woman, 2012 – Charles Ray
The provost, who is involved in the pastoral work of assisting the homeless, had been struck above all by the strange spirituality emanating from Sleeping Woman, a 2012 work that is a steel monolith weighing 2620 kilos. He would have liked to acquire the steel sleeper for the parvis of Saint-Germain-des-Prés or, better yet, to place it inside.
A penitential admonition that crosses the welfare orders of the Counter – Reformation with the apostolate aimed at the poor and refugees of Abbé Pierre, cast in a jarring social phenomenon of today, unfortunately widespread in the Ville Lumiere.
Ray explained how that sculpture came about. «I was out and about in LA when I came across this sleeping woman. I could see her already at the distance of a block. In truth I passed her several times in the same area. I wondered how it could seem possible that nothing could stir her. She lay slumped on a bench, vulnerable and exposed but as if encased in a separate capsule. She was not dead, injured or ill in any way, totally functional in sleep. Maybe she was dreaming. She had fallen asleep as a mountain slept. I began to think about the geology of sleep but also about the social conditions that had reduced her to homelessness. When we are immersed in sleep, we all look the same. I saw the sculpture, built of solid metal, because the woman’s sleep had weight. Her beauty remained delicate, an intact emanation despite the harshness of the situation».
Yuboku Mukoyoshi’s atelier in Osaka and Forton MG scan
A production process that ranges from the recognition and iteration of the digitized image to design the model, to the choice of the most suitable material, to be entrusted to workshops-such as Yuboku Mukoyoshi’s atelier in Osaka, heir to a centuries-old tradition, for carved woodwork-and to be sourced from suppliers of the highest quality and capacity for innovation scattered all over the world. Futuristic technologies such as Forton MG scans, a gypsum mixture reinforced with fiberglass, available since 1990, and for the finished statues, an armature in stainless steel defining the total volume, then covered with fiberglass and white paint.
Forton* is a reinforced plaster, a material that has been used in the studio for many years. Sometimes we paint the foam model directly. The execution process consists of several steps in which handwork and machine work alternate Once the digitization is complete, a metal block is worked by a slow machining process, driven by a computer. Counter to everything we know about metal sculpture, the pieces are not cast. The finishing stage is delicate. An obsession with perfection, a will to surpass expressed through this formal acuity and the use of maniacal technology entrusted only to experienced and known hands. The artist finally will exhibit on an equal footing several finished versions of the same work done in different materials, but never the archetype in clay, nor the preparatory models, which remains in the studio. The materials used range from stainless steel to silver, aluminum, and painted bronze, from ceramic and plaster to carbon fiber or glass, from marble, stone, Virginia Mist black granite, and cypress wood to a special hand-prepared Japanese paper composed of arcane ingredients and with a candid and refined texture.
Charles Ray’s secret is the burglary of meaning
Charles Ray’s secret is the burglary of meaning, the ability to take away your stability and security in front of one of his works, even if it represents the apparent certainty of a human body. It is an oxymoron, heightened by the bewildering use of materials that often succeed in having an effect contrary to the characteristics of weight, pliability and surface that characterize them and that we can usually perceive.
It is a game that tends to reverse and confuse perceptions, overturning clues and senses to throw off, engage and surprise. The classical derivation that harks back to Greco-Roman roots or the Renaissance, no longer reassuring and familiar, falls apart and almost becomes hallucination. Elsewhere, Eleusinian reliefs manifest themselves liquid inside aluminum surfaces and coiffures bloom with stylized petals in pop colors that nullify their pathos and plastic depth.
Everything is suspended, filtered, detached from itself and from any plastic physicality. Echoes of Hellenistic heritage, the belonging of millennia-old Middle Eastern cultures, the pathos of Donatello goes off on a tangent, break down into fractals and spatial segments that float in a sensory rarefaction. Space impossible to define and fully understand, rhythmic of boundless time, as much past as future.
Charles Ray is free from the observance and conditioning of any legacy, even as he confesses admiration for the Greek matrix and the Italian Renaissance, for Michelangelo and Verrocchio’s Orsammichele in Florence, or for the reclining Venuses painted in sixteenth century Venice by Giorgione and Titian. As well as Manet’s Olympia from which descends the Reclining Woman in stainless steel weighing almost three thousand kilograms and the Portrait of the Artist’s Mother of 2021, impudent and chalk- white muliebral nude, blooming with corollas in fluorescent hues, entirely made by paper – a de facto tridimensional drawing.
Charles Ray: proportion or rather the ‘disproportion’
Charles Ray offers a novel experience in the relationship with the real. He suggests that the levels of reality are quite different from how we normally come to perceive them and much more articulate. Sculpture is the discipline par excellence of the relationship with space. In Charles Ray’s poetics it is the proportion or rather the ‘disproportion’, at first imperceptible then increasingly evident, that drops you into another dimension, that destabilizes you by removing your belief that you control reality.
A duplicity with ambiguous boundaries, pursued since 1992, when Ray introduces a radical change of scale with Fall 1991. «This sculpture follows all the proportions of a mannequin. When properly installed two things could happen. As the viewer approaches, the mannequin becomes larger, or the viewer becomes smaller. The only thing that changes is the scale. The sculpture is thirty percent larger than a normal department store mannequin. Across a vast space it seems correct. You can’t read the scale as the figuration trumps the scale. Space itself becomes a dynamic material in the elements which make up the work. The sculpture does not sit in space, it is made of space, space transformed into fluid dynamics of our existence».
Separation and isolation: Charles Ray
Charles likes to take a walk early in the morning and in solitude, wherever he is he lives in concentration, dropped into his idea of art, a dimension of existence that cannot be affected or disturbed. He decided to change his home in Los Angeles to retire to high ground in a semi-desert canyon when his new neighbors started playing tennis doggedly on their court making too much noise. The long lockdown period experienced him in ascetic isolation, and he became an incubator of ideas. The search for an alchemical measure and this uncanny proportion forced him into a separation from others worthy of a Trappist monk.
God, or a gravitational force: Charles Ray
In Paris, not far from the Supine Concrete Dwarf of 2021, on one wall stood Study after Algardi, an accomplished sculpture made of the whitest Japanese paper handmade with a secret recipe. It is a cross less reproduction of the so-called Living Christ conceived by Alessandro Algardi, a Baroque sculptor who was Bernini’s great rival on the scene in seventeenth century Rome.
A prototype that from the mid-seventeenth century spread throughout Europe over more than a century, replicated in various sizes and multiple materials such as marble, bronze, ivory, silver, and Doccia ceramics.
An enormous Christ Crucified, but with a relatively low weight of 55 kg. The paper-like lime dematerialized it, making it a ghost ready to vanish into plaster. It is a symbolic banner garrulous in the wind. It could be an emblem of the monumental, ever-increasing fragility of the civilization of the West, embodied in the dissent expressed by Nietzsche: Dionysus versus the Crucified.
Nietzsche invented a new destiny and saw himself seated at the deathbed of Christianity, penetrating like no one else inside the crisis of our civilization and the Christian humus that permeated it. For the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel, the death of God is a point of departure, something like a springboard for a prodigious leap, for a creative impetus. The God whose death Nietzsche declared is that of the Aristotelian tradition, and the casual formal bond that humanity shares with him must be transformed into a relationship of freedom. I wonder if Charles Ray alludes to this very hypothesis. While installing the sculpture, Silvia wrote that Charles had commented, «If you are a believer you believe in God, if you are not you believe in gravitational force».
Fondation Pinault
Fondation Pinault’s circular central volume resolved into something solemn, fibrillating and airy. Lysergic candor imagined a magic triangle between the Crashed Truck of 2021, the paper self-portrait Return to the One, inspired by Plotinus’ thought, and The New Beetle (2006), a painted steel child sitting on the floor intent on playing with a Volkswagen Beetle model.
One of Charles’s favorite works. «If the object is able to move you physically, it will also move you intellectually. At the Bourse de Commerce, on a flat floor of Tadao Ando’s rotunda I unbalanced my truck that I found in a playboy penthouse in Des Moines, Iowa, used as a sculptural coffee table for several decades. It was put up for sale when the young man got old and died. I unbalanced it, crumbled it, and found its form, a kind of resurrection more Greek than alien».
Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
At the Beaubourg, the contrast between the works was blunter, not seeking assonances or underlying dialogues. «The interior of the building is its exterior, and it has no floors. A sloping square invites us down». Hinoki, (2007), a fleshed-out cypress trunk, dominated the space. From a terrace, the darting steel bodies of Huck and Jim mirrored the thousand lights of the city as night fell.
«The Huck and Jim sculpture was designed for the new Whitney Museum building, inspired by Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn». The challenge is to create a figurative sculpture without resorting to literal gestures and avoiding sexual politics. The idea is to depict a naked white boy and black man, without a fishing pole or raft, and to encourage the viewer to see beyond cultural battles.
