2007 Q2

Art statement

My father once said: "If in the creative process we get accustomed to a manneristic style, we move away from reality, and eventually the art dries out. Artists must always return to reality, stare in its infinite depths, and rediscover what they once thought to be truth."

This reminds me of the famous maxim in Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil: "When you stare into an abyss for a long time, the abyss also stares into you."

Real artistic independence is hard to achieve. Painting a portrait is difficult because we need to overcome accepted representations of likeness.

And what artist has been more obsessed with reality then Alberto Giacometti: "Only reality interests me now and I know I could spend the rest of my life in copying a chair."

Other quotes by Alberto Giacometti:

• "The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity."

• "I paint and sculpt to get a grip on reality... to protect myself."

• "That's the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it."

  • "When I make my drawings... the path traced by my pencil on the sheet of paper is, to some extent, analogous to the gesture of a man groping his way in the darkness."

  • "In every work of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist's obsession with his subject; the form is always in proportion to the obsession."

  • "At first, one sees the person who is modelling; but little by little, all of the possible sculptures that could be made come between artist and model."

  • "If the glass there in front of me astounds me more than all the glasses I've seen in painting, and if I even think that the greatest architectural wonder of the world couldn't affect me more than this glass, it's really not worth while going to the Indies to see some temple or other when I have as much and more right in front of me."

  • "Artistically I am still a child with a whole life ahead of me to discover and create. I want something, but I won't know what it is until I succeed in doing it."