Alain
Kirili
March 11 to April 24, 2004
Essays
- Paul Audi
- Sarah Lewis
- William Jeffett
Anthology
I gaze at Alain's assemblages, I project my phantasm onto them, I lend
existence to my passions. I imagine. And I also imagine that others are
imagining. Our imaginaries meet, or, on the contrary, flee from each other.
Scattered and solitary, we try to establish a contact through this intimacy
that everyday life is intended to destroy but without which there would
nevertheless be no sensible time. Aluminum, terra cotta, plaster, cement
: Kirili shapes the obscure sense of our bodies into form and matter before
speech arrives to cast light on them. He gives the sacred a profane, robust,
approachable existence. At the same time, informed as it is by the history
of art and charged with words and myths, his apparent minimalism nourishes
my senses and my associations. I love to sound out this moment when sculpture
ceases to be a fetish object and unleashes my imagination as it integrates
itself into my life.
- Julia Kristeva, "The imaginary sense of forms" in Arts
Magazine, September 1991
Commandment may relate obliquely to previous "scripted" sculptures,
such as David Smith's "The Letter." But it is ultimately invested
with a strongly personal balance of tradition and ambition, of the established
and the experimental. This work has been produced in a series, with variations
of elements and arrangements. Yet the concern has not been with the mathematical
forms of permutation found in Minimalist art. In Commandment, a different
kind of variety-within-unity seems to model itself on written language
as a rule-bound yet flexible formal system, abstract yet generating and
communicating meaning from epoch to epoch and culture to culture. To the
flattened checkerboards of Minimal floor-sculptures, Commandment offers
a chessboard rebuttal, affirmatively lifting itself from the floor plane
and evoking the authority of symbolic form in human spiritual history.
This "text" sculpture is Old Testament and Post-minimalism at
once, reverent on the one hand and rebel on the other.
- Kirk Varnedoe, catalogue essay, in "Alain Kirili,"
at the Musée Rodin, Paris 1985
Kirili's insistence on this organic metaphor extends to his choice and
treatment of sculptural matter. Already in the works of 1976-78, whether
in the hand-worked terra cottas, so often pierced, like Christ's head,
by iron nails or in the iron pieces which lean so tenuously, like growing
stems, against supporting the wall surfaces, Kirili's use of materials
suggested the qualities of growth, movement, change; but in his amazing
mastery of such an archaic technique as forged iron (a tradition he has
resurrected in his work under the discipleship of two blacksmiths, one
American, Samuel Yellin, and one Austrian, Florian Unterrainer) this experience
is further enriched.
- Robert Rosenblum, catalogue essay, in "Kirili", Kunstmuseum,
Dusseldorf, 1983
…For Kirili this has lead to forging rather than welding-though Smith
sometimes explored the technique as well-and to a kind of drawing in space
that exploits the complete range of molten metal's temporary softness
and pliability rather than the patching together of rigid shapes. Over
the course of an artistic career that stretches back some thirty years,
Kirili has expanded the horizons opened to him by this method of working,
and thereby laid claim to his own territory within the still wider field
of "Action Sculpture," a territory which has incorporated the
related use of terra-cotta, and, in recent years, a growing emphasis on
performative sculpture in various materials, sometimes in collaboration
with musicians.
Communion represents the latest phase of this steady evolution and of
Kirili's longstanding dialogue with Smith. In some regards it is akin
to Smith's totemic drawings in its alignment of hieratic forms, but the
attenuation of each element, the hammered texturing of some, the pinched
outlines of others, and the subtle play of leaden against rust-red color,
matte against shiny patinas is unlike anything to be found in Smith's
oeuvre. Nor is the cage-support-in effect a hollow plinth-from which each
unit is suspended, and on which they almost seem to swing. In the background
of Kirili's work are the figures González had to reckon with, as
did Smith-Brancusi of the rough-hewn monoliths and the "Endless Towers"
and Picasso as every turn of his protean career as a sculptor, up to and
including sculptures such as the Bathers (1954). Also present in mind
are the examples of Alberto Giacometti and Barnett Newman, author of only
a few sculptures but an indispensable radical in the medium nonetheless.
Kirili's writings on Newman and Giacometti and the larger issue of statuary
that their work and that of other modernists raise are central to Kirili's
thinking and to his practice.
In sum, Kirili's work generally and Communion in particular are informed
by many dimensions of Rosenberg's "Tradition of the New." And
to borrow Rosenberg's criterion for quality in modern art they possess
an individual "freshness" that holds that tradition at its proper
distance. Of all the conversations Kirili has had with other artists past
and present, those with Smith-whom he has championed since first encountering
his work in 1965 and first visiting the United States that year to deepen
his acquaintance with it-are the most important.
- Robert Storr, "David Smith, the probity of his art",
in "David Smith's drawings," ENSBA, Paris 2003
Kirili's titles--such as Meditation, Levitation, or Commandment, for
a signature assemblage of stolid shapes connoting the Hebrew alphabet
that he has re-visited over the years, Symphony of Psalms, for a burst
aluminum triumvirate, or Ascension, for a vertical trinity in white resin--establish
an exalted association that perhaps seeks to bestow on matter a more transcendent
life. "It has always been difficult for me to have people appreciate
that my sculptures are not objects," Kirili recently told a gathering
at New York's Studio School. "What is sculpture if it is not an object?
Yet I think that what I do is a living body. It is not just cerebral or
conceptual. It is the result of a direct physical act," he said,
referring to his often aerobic gestuary of forging the reaction of matter
to motion, of investing instinct and sensation in shaping each work. Kirili's
method of direct attack signifies not aggression but an intimate handling
of material, without intermediaries. It is his dialogue with the work.
"Sculpture," he told the audience of young artists, "is
not inert."
- Ginger Danto, "Alain Kirili: Sculpture as Living Dialogue,"
Sculpture Magazine, November 2003
photography by Christian Carone unless otherwise indicated