THE DESTINY OF THE MODERN HERO

“The fascination of poetry lies in the unspoken words” wrote Mallarmè stating one of the basic principles of literary symbolism. The mystery of non existence, the beauty of what’s missing, taken “felt” as missing has not escaped the sensibility of artists past and present.

In September 1902 the poet Rilke was spellbound by all fragments – arms, legs and torsos – filling Rodin’s workshop. They were only pieces, shreds, fragments, but enough for the poet to feel a sense of totality and unity so strong to require no further complement.
We must therefore believe Ambroise Vollard’s autobiography when he describes an inspired Rodin passionately breaking an mutilating sculptures with a sword in order to “get” to the fragment. After all with “The walking man”, a headless and armless walking figure the French master shocked the academic world which was used to a traditionally complete representation of the body. On this basis Constantin Brancusi owes much to Rodin as his first works simple heads with no neck simply laid on a basement.

The “poetry of fragmentation” now returns to contemporary sculpture thanks to Polish artist Igor Mitoraj. The iconographical repertory of grecian and roman classic art inspires his ideal bodies represented in bronze and marble with perfect proportions; but his heroes and gods are broken, mutilated, veiled; they reveal their silent and secret harmony, their absolute beauty in what is taken away from them. The observer can’t however resist the temptation to imagine the lines of a broken profile, to visualise eyes that are not there.

Michele Balestra’s sculpture tries instead to give back to the fragment its full ethical and aesthetical autonomy as in this instance it does not try to represent a piece from an old glorious civilisation, it does not try to recreate the splendour of a mythical Atlantis.

Balestra’s fragment does not want to be an instrument to restore the “whole”, the “unity” because what divides it from space isn’t a violent break or a painful corrosion. His works are not broken, destroyed by a painful autopsy: his heroes are born this way. Naturally incomplete, carrying an original wound with smooth and harmonious contours, a wound which finds its completeness in what is missing.

In Balestra’s fragments there’s no ambiguity that might lead us to believe they are archaeological findings destroyed by some apocalyptic event and somehow survived, albeit broken, to the wear and tear of time. His figures are born in the present to represent, with its lights and shades, the fragile condition of the contemporary man desperately searching for his broken identity, desperately trying to reaffirm an unique and extraordinary individuality. Balestra’s alchemy lies in synthesising in his faces, which are so proud, although so fragile in their desperate beauty, the magic of the meeting of active life and contemplative life, of spirit and matter, of soul and world.

The sculptor gives the sequence of “Ashes to Ashes” the task of making tangible the comic afflatus that lies in his unfinished works. Matter changes continually, it expands and shrinks, thus revealing different moments of the same man: one moment the eyes are looking, another the mouth appears, now emptiness is sucking the face in. Slowly the fragments seem to compose themselves in a complete unity. But unity is just an instant, it can’t last. The eternal and universal search for human perfection has to start again.

“Ashes to ashes” does not only represent the unavoidable circle of life and death. “Ashes to ashes” describes the parabola, from dawn to dusk, of man’s journey in himself, man’s attempt to free himself re-aggregating his identity in order to achieve the highest goal: reforming himself and claiming the dignity of his own place in the world.

“Everybody’s real vocation is to get to his own self” says Demian in Hermann Hesse’s homonymous novel. Even Balestra has modelled his “Demian” in bronze. A broken face, the embryo of an ego, vivified by his yearning for self consciousness. Hesse’s characters are to be found in several of the works’ titles: “Siddartha” lost in contemplation of the skies, “Boccadoro” (Goldmund), “Il lupo della steppa” (der Steppenwolf), a fragmented face in pieces that attract and repel each other without recognising each other.

It seems therefore correct to use Hesse’s own words to get to the heart of the poetic conception of the sculptor from Bergamo: “He who has got feelings obeys a different law, a sacred unique law that he finds inside himself, the law of the sense of individuality (…) A hero is a man that made his destiny out of his unique feelings, out of this noble and natural individuality.”

The re-foundation of man, leitmotiv of Balestra’s research, when not translated in these fragmented souls, suspended on the edge between past and present, spirit and matter, life and universe, is then captured by mirrors that hauntingly return the same features.
“Alienation” is a contemporary enigma that suggests to search in the “absence”, in the only empty box, the secret of its own uniqueness.

Classical forms and oriental culture blend to make these sculptures the icons of an internal search. A meaningful legend, which the sculptor came across during one of his trips in China, tells of how man was originally born with divine powers. The gods however soon regretted granting so much power to man and therefore decided to take it away from him and to hide it somewhere inaccessible. Somebody proposed to hide it on the highest mountain, others to abandon it in the depth of the oceans. But the danger that man, maybe centuries later, would eventually find his powers, tormented the gods.
They therefore decided to hide these powers in the only place where man would never find them: inside man himself.

Balestra’s fragments tell the story of the continuous search deep inside himself, looking for the archetype that connects the man with his own origins. A slow dissolution of the individual’s shape in the soul of the world.

It is from this basis that the incomparable grandiosity of the “Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus” head that communicates the serenity of a newly found certainty develops. The neck’s tendon flex, the chin lifts, the lips relax and here, where matter gives way to spirit and senses give way to imagination, one can almost have the sensation of perceiving a towering stare. A majestic and wise stare at the horizon of a soul that floats over our heads and our skins, way beyond the borders of ego.

Like ancient Greece’s Kourous these bronzes represent at the same time a divine nature and a monument to mankind. Balestra does not believe in “the death of the gods” forgotten in the dark times of the middle ages and as he gives them their own classical shape and form he wants to reinstate their original beauty in order to draw from the historic memory that they symbolize.

In a time where the “significant” seems to have lost its battle with the “significance”, in a time where on the canvas as well as in sculpture we are moving from the certainties of a naturalistic representation to the representation of energy, emotions and thought, our sculptor decides to adopt a classical language to express a contemporary angst. However this is not an escape from the present time to glorious past. In a classic art study, “Survival of the ancient Gods”, Jean Seznec states that the gods and not dead just because they were deprived of their classical form; therefore each way of expression follows a cycle and as it represents itself it already plants the seeds for the next way.

To use classical shapes and forms is a medium that Balestra uses to reassert the value of beauty, being convinced that aesthetic appraisal is essential to the soul’s wellbeing (Plotinus himself stated that “the souls is always an Aphrodites”) and should guide our choices. The same beauty which is today’s world is either neglected or relegated to simply being identified with something pretty and pleasant, but devoid of intellectual meaning.

Skilfully moving his fingers on clay, Balestra dialogues with classical art, moulding regular shapes and plastic bodies denoting a masterly command of forms and proportions.

It is not difficult to trace Balestra’s models: Rodin’s fragments, Michelangelo’s bodies, the elegant and agile shape of Cellini’s Perseus. The Sculptor has not forgotten to pay a tribute to his favourite master in the imposing bust of “Cincinnatus”. “Cosimo I” by Cellini becomes, in Balestra’s work the roman hero, fully dignified in his double nature of warriors and peasant. On Cincinnatus armour Cosimo’s symbolism of power gives way, once again, to an eastern legend: the legend of the pearl of wisdom, created and guarder by the dragon and the phoenix.

Finally a work on Balestra’s favourite medium : bronze. Bronze is selected not for its monumental effects, but rather for its timeless appeal and charm, for its capacity of capturing lights and shades, to unify weight and lightness.

Balestra’s bronzes when viewed from different angles, from different heights appear as suspended in a timeless and spaceless dimension communicating various feelings. Cincinnatus’ bust is, at the same time , the portrait of a haughty politician, the expression of a wise man, the embodiment of a great statesman, the poetic fragment of a simple man turned into hero because he has found himself.

Distancing themselves from the wilful gods of Poussin, Lorrain or even Puvis de Chavanne, Balestra’s mythological figures silently pervade our own time to restore harmony between man and his own destiny. Admiring his works in the twilight of a room or in a museum, rather than in a dazzling exterior light we can feel, in their “missing” stares, the indefinite appeal of a modern theogony.