As he investigates the primitive aspect of our nature, the sculptor arrives at the pristine aspect of an animal, which is its sacred manifestation. This “sacredness” of an animal, usually worshiped and glorified from the dawn of mankind, is brought to the forefront again here. The sculptor builds his own private temple for the animals, the way monkey temples were built in India, or jaguar sanctuaries were created in Mexico.

The big animals retain their most static, archaic dimension. Beasts such as elephants, hippopotami, or gorillas are sacred “prophets” in the sculptor’s personal symbolic language. He gives a perpetual moving energy to their mass as exemplified in the voluminous sculptures of the beasts David chooses to create. The sculptor freezes the beasts in an instant in which the animal’s energy manifests itself. As the result, the sculpture’s power is embodied in that reduced and minimized momentum. The sculptor formally divides his work into three categories of sacred priests, warriors, and terrestrial beings.

However, his bronzes, taking forms such as Darwin or a Zoroastrian prophet, deny all the categories: ontologically they nourish the idea of the embryo and its metamorphosis. The sculpture tells us the story about our birth and development on earth where the fallen Adams and Eves give in to earthly pleasures.

The series of “Prophets” includes mythical beings—an orangutan who is a Pharaoh, an Asian elephant who is mightier than Ganesh, an African marabou invoking prophecies, a study of a hand escaped from Michelangelo’s studio, and a fortune-telling mouse. Even the prince of darkness Satan himself appears in a sculpture entitled Batman, and again in Dark Prince, which is a graceful bronze of a scorpion. However, all of these “ animals,” being already pure in their essence, do not evoke the Aristotelian notion of catharsis.

The binding element in all of them is humor, which ranges from Daumier’s grotesque, with the Pharaoh, to the Surrealist joke, as exemplified in the insects and smaller animals in Hadrien’s theater of “earthly delights.”

Many of these sculptures openly originate from images drawn from Biblical tales. The animals are really princely creatures for him, thus the story of the Dark Prince or the story of a fallen angel who dabbles with religions and terrorist actions, and who is our “next-door neighbor” out there to kill or undermine our desires.

In contrast to these concrete figures from the animal and the animated world, there stands a long 2.4 meter totem made in mortar, which serves as an abstract “animus” for the sculptor, representing his interior as a process of constant transformation. During the years of the demanding work with bronze as material, Hadrien David has acquired and developed his own themes—from Michelangelo he takes a muscular precision mixed with a lyrical beauty, which is the manner in which he works on his torsos. Gericault had inspired his approach to horses, and Degas’ dancers and choreography informed his approach to smaller animals.

A cinema-inspired approach is also very characteristic of the sculptor’s work. The group of “Warriors” consists of powerful animals; white leopards, bulls, running horses, jaguars, and apes. Here, the warrior’s stance is manifested in an upward movement through the air. These beasts are never quite static as they embody the essence of the movement itself. This exceptional quality in David’s work makes a clear distinction between his sculptures from a great number of artists who have worked within the same genre.

There is an erotic force in his forms, as their muscular mass takes over the space they inhabit. On view here is a certain Husserlian notion of epoche, a sort of suspending of the “natural attitude” toward the object that we experience. In order to get us into this state of suspension that we have in relation to an animal, the sculptor does an in-depth “dissection” of the model. This approach was observed by the old masters, but it has all but completely disappeared over time. He is influenced by the Classical Greek art and their approach to sculpture. The frog is, perhaps for him, the animal that expresses the plasticity of the body most dynamically.

Hadrien David’s harmonic vision is at its best in his “terrestrial” group, obeying the perpetual rites of fecundity including gorillas (Adam’s Temptation), dancing frogs (The Egyptian), and kangaroos (The Athlete). As all these animals belong to the same earthly parade, the sculptor places them in an unusual setting within his work The Doors of Paradise. It is here that his work resembles more the work of a theater director who places the scenes into a certain sculptural setting. Here he approaches both the Surrealist cinema of Jan Svankmajer or Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty.

Hadrien’s sculptures, thus, are both real and surreal. Their reality comes from the feeling that sculpture is the stomach of our history, and as the history of sculpture is his life-story, it is also the story of his multilayered presentation of the past combined with the present.

By Nina Zivancevic

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This extraordinary  singer, songwriter and a pianist who grew up in Manhattan under the auspices of the Off-Off-Off Broadway Theatre scene of the 1970s had studied classical music and jazz before she became a world globe-trotter and toured the Americas with salsa giants such as Willie Colon and Ruben Blades only to continue her exploration of sound with Christoph Mueller (of Gotan Project) in Paris. She not only formed with him a nomadic trip-hop-art-rock band (Ten Mother Tongues) which resulted in their CD “The Listening Tree” but also decided to stay in Europe, endowing the local sound with her acoustic ,  American experience, rich in warm, personal musings. Soon after,she formed her trio with a songwriter/singer HT Roberts and a percussionist Niels Delvaux (with De Maeseneer on saxes and Bart Maris on trumpet) , an unusual experience which combines acoustic and organic sounds, as exemplified on her second album “Trouble With Park Avenue”.

Her third, wildly contemplative cum romantic work, “Pyramid Lake” summarizes, in a way, all her previous experience and yet its freshness and “innocence regained” in the most spiritual sense of that expression attest to a new turning in Arnon’s career. What to say about someone who has successfully collaborated on various levels with the artists such as Paul Aston, Karel Beer, La Bergère, Sal Bernardi, Ruben Blades, Chochana Boukhobza, Thierry Bouyer, Soledad Bravo, Rodolph Burger, Roberto Cacciapaglia, Ronnie Caryl, Matthias Clark, Philippe Cohen-Solal, BJ Cole, Willie Colon, Djelly Moussa Condé, Lemmy Constantine, Brian Cullman, Niels Delvaux, Janice De Rosa, Diblo Dibala, Fima Ephron, The Five O’Clock Jazz group, Stephane Furic, Peter Giron, John Greaves, Stéphane Guéry, Theo Hakola, Gijs Hollebosch, Marten Ingle, Nick Jury, John Lester, Tony Leone, Gary Lukas, Luis Marquez, Fiona McBain, Danny Montgomery, Christoph H. Mueller, Stéphane Missri, Tiberio Nascimiento, Glen Patscha, Renaud Gabriel Pion, Vic Pitts, Laurence Revey, HT Roberts, Barry Rogers, Roland Romanelli, Julie Saury, Tonton Didou, Nibs Van Der Spuy, Arne Van Dongen, Jasmine Vegas, Geraint Watkins, Ben Werbolowski, George Wolfhaardt, Gabriel Yacoub, Catherine Zeeta-Jones..? Useless to keep on counting all the precious encounters in a life of an accomplished musician…

However, it’s worth noticing that all Arnon’s different sounds resulting from these eclectic  and highly professional experiences with other artists magically  fuse  into the melancholic staccato of her “Pyramid Lake”. Gabriela is an ecological fighter who would like to preserve the Earth intact (hear her Persephone’s Field or The Seed) and she sings our worries for the disappearing water quite loud. She is also a Calypso queen who dances her salsa vocally in “Queen of the May”, or an African shamanic healer-woman who drones away our destiny in “Maiden, Mother, Crone”.

The expressionist strain in Arnon’s musical upbringing will bring us eventually to a profound sigh and yearning for the infinite in her last track, no.11, entitled “Far Beyond Our Little Gallaxy”. In that privileged space, reserved for very few  contemporary artists /composers who have had a long career and who create that particular musical experience which makes us think that “all the rest is noise”, dwells the creative effort of “Pyramid Lake”. It is fresh, and easy, but it moves us- to think: about the world as an inner but also  a committed and outer experience, difficult to pass by. Yes, Gabriela Arnon is on the path of Baez and Zara Leander .. and her claim to fame is yet to be made in the years to come.

By Nina Zivancevic

The post Nina Zivancevic Floats On By In Gabriela Arnon’s Pyramid Lake appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

In her series of photos Women of Allah and The Book of the Kings, she tackles the delicate subject of her cultural heritage – a certain emotional and intellectual commitment in which Iranian women make to honour their great civilization, while at the same time rebelling against that tradition. We see a similar kind of attitude in Marjane Satrapi’s work, primarily in her book and subsequent film Persepolis. Her paintings are dark and expressionistic, but extremely sophisticated. Neshat takes a different approach, imposing a more severe, black and white approach to the world where she came from. Her stance is even more traditional or nostalgic, as she left Iran at the age of 17 for the United States, and as such has maintained a complicated relationship to her native country.

Neshat combines in her images a mixture of slick western imagery with the letters in Farsi. She is aware of her rich tradition, but she never blatantly speaks of her anxiety nor makes an overtly political commentary. As she remembers ancient battlefields, warriors enraptured in the games of chess and strategy, and soldiers with their hearts pierced and bleeding, we are made highly aware of her outlook in this contemporary moment. Neshat is acutely aware of the fact that Iran is composed of different nations and various religions. As she depicts ancient rites of the Zoroastrians, we feel that she is close to that Tower of Silence where the dead bodies go to rest. The profound questions in regards to life and death are always at the center of her work. Her understanding of the complexities of this diverse international life are what keep her work at the forefront, positioning her amongst an elite group of contemporary artists.

The post Close to the Tower of Silence: Shirin Neshat by Nina Zivancevic appeared first on NY Arts Magazine.

Belic’s universe is quite ordained, but at its best escapes a pragmatic order. His triangles are usually playful and imposed on us in an upside-down manner. The sculptures are made out of light material such as plexiglas or plastic, wood, or even cardboard. For Belic, the most important thing for them is that the essence of their entire existence be identified as musical.

The artist is the author of several books of art theory. What’s really being exhibited through his work is a certain philosophy of art which is not encumbering, as heavy theory can be, but is applied in a manner that is rather playful and accesible. It invites the spectator to challenge stale analytical views of space and numbers. It is as if Wittgenstein went out to his garden and started playing with his theoretical applications amongst the flowers.

However, his painting is a bit different, as it belongs to a certain Surrealist orientation, a road that has been somewhat already explored in various directions and almost forgotten on the international scene since the late 1970s. Milija Belic has participated in many group shows and has gotten many awards for his art, but his first one-man show was delightfully staged at Galerie Monod in Paris by the end of 2012. It was an exhibition long in the making, and one fans of calculated poetics will not soon forget.

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