Maria Pina Cirillo
The impact on the art world - The Third Christ Carrying The Cross Giustiniani - Pablo Damian Cristi
Created by Pablo Damian Cristi and carved from a magnificent block of Carrara marble personally chosen by him, the third Giustiniani Christ expresses an intense philosophy of cultural identity of mankind, which emphasizes a strong connection both with the past and with the future, but above all with the present.
The work, which completes the trilogy including the two previous Giustiniani Christ Portacroce sculptures, both Michelangelesque works that were not completed by him for various reasons, evokes Pablo’s struggle with marble, a material of great charm and vigorous character, capable of influencing the final creation in a significant way, which only the mastery of the sculptor can control. But it also narrates his uninterrupted search for the meaning of the eternal and the human, both fully rendered by the topicality and depth of the message that expresses the anxieties and pains, but also the hopes, of our everyday life.
Present at every moment of the artist’s existence, also due to the heavy surname he bears, capable of modifying the way in which he perceives the world, pushing him to review every concept, every possibility, the Christ, undoubtedly the Argentine sculptor’s life’s work, communicates to the viewers the essence of a commitment made of inspiration, creativity, and thought, but also of work and chisel, of hammer and sweat. And this is what allows him to give us this creation that fascinates viewers, directed not only to internalize the primordial force it emanates and to grasp its most real meaning, but also enraptured by the material that becomes palpable, by the aura of mystery that emanates from it, by the painful sense of existence manifested through a gesturality of sober drama, without excess, alien to any expressive clamor.
Aimed at surpassing the historical-cultural depersonalization of our time, it presents not only, and not so much, the figure of God made man who takes up our cross but also the Man-God who guides us not to give up but to fight with courage and live with strength and dignity.
This is the response of Cristi to an increasingly unfortunate art and time, dominated by the “hic et nunc” which makes man bound only to the finite more fragile. It is an artistic choice of incredible communicative value that has led him to unlimited spiritual growth, to the continuous search for the immaterial, the invisible, capable of shaping matter and infusing actual inner life into marble, an engaging emotional charge, capable of capturing the maximum from the legacy of the greats, of converting the artistic-cultural history of man into a propulsive force.
Thanks to an evocative creative vein and the ability to translate ideas into actions, the sculptor manages to make the most intimate chords of the human soul vibrate: he digs into the silence of matter, evokes the calm that becomes marble, and makes the boundless space and slow passage of time, the secret power of darkness and the brilliance of light, the joyful strength of nature and the unattainable mystery of the arcane his own. And at the very moment he shapes the marble block, he also shapes himself because “every blow, every removal has a meaning, and every meaning is anchored in the deepest genuineness. Just as I remove and shape the marble, it does the same with my soul!”
Faced with a challenge that the artist, exegete and interpreter of a broader vision of the contemporary world, cannot and does not want to refuse, strong of an important relationship with the great Michelangelo, his true master and inspirer, whose non-finito he particularly appreciates, Cristi reaches a great depth of values. Translating, in a creation rich in pathos, but above all in ethos, the eternal aspiration of man, the incessant and challenging investigation into the roots of existence, his intuition of what unites every material presupposition, every primordial material to its primordial essence, he embraces the inscrutability that permeates existence itself, losing himself in the face of the greatness of human feeling and the immensity and incomprehensibility of God.
Like every true master, Cristi does not settle for sketching, chiseling, and sculpting, but seeks the hidden form in the material not yet roughed out, and then pulls it out with the help of only those tools used by those who, in past ages, have given us an art that is not only a creative spur and inventive impulse, but also precision, diligent accuracy, mental and physical effort.
Able to delve, thanks to his refined talent and executive mastery, into the collective unconscious, into the most hidden archetypes, he makes his work unique by instilling it with life and decanting it of any purely decorative and accessory element, giving it a remarkable cathartic capacity that transforms it into a microcosm that re-examines the nodal events of the vast universe to extract the basic concepts and manifest the incessant tension of man towards the infinite and the eternal.