Cripta Museum San Alberto 1782 - Córdoba, Argentina
(2018)
There are spaces that contain historical plots that remain active. In this case, I try to fusion the time with the created object to make the Work “A Place for Pain”.
Taking distance beyond the materiality of their appearances, we find a place (orphan girls’ home) where all the house chores were done and as part of life, this was the place where the death were buried. This is where pain was humanized and paradoxically, was given a sense of transcendence.
Nowadays men hide it, disguise it, suffering it even more. That reality, each time more unreal, affects that spiritual stratum leading to sorrow. The pain appears in an unearthly way, touching our most profound mechanisms to wake us up from superficial life. Without warning, men like seeds - metaphorically speaking - have a hidden greatness, potentialities that within effort, regarding intelligence and will, can turn the suffering path into a personal purifying process.
“When the seeds are buried in the deepest of earth, its most intimate secrets, turn into blooming gardens”
Rumi XIII Century
Scultural object
1, 00x 1, 00m
format: glass box
seed husks intervened
bone with finishing process
with its morphology
set in silver
Walls full of content that join with
work to form a single work: A space for pain
View 1
Entry into space
When the traces of pain obstruct intelligence, when pain is unbearable, perhaps only art can offer shelter.
Cervi’s installation unleashes a multiplicity of symbolisms and meanings. It is composed of pistachio seeds forming imaginary ovals through a meticulous process of placing them one beside the other. The work itself functions as a kind of litany, where repetition fosters an introspection that connects the artist and the viewer with history, memory, recollections, dreaming, the mystical, and the sacred.
Seeds, an oval surrounding a mounted bone arranged in a silver bowl — the artist possesses the creative talent to find in these elements an approach to the enigmatic side of pain and to the possibility of redemption that art awakens.
The work is located in a crypt, surrounded by solitude and silence, an environment that favors connection with the deepest part of oneself. Cervi speaks of the spiritual and the sacred that transcend religions, that go beyond, encompassing humanity regardless of religion.
The originality of creation and illumination demands silent, meditative, and solitary work. Something that in this case both the work and the space intensely encourage.
Patricia O´Donnell