Text by Elisabetta Maria Elena Buttiglione about the sculptor Elias Naman
It is not easy at first glance to penetrate the sublime and melancholic world of sculptor Elias Naman, although the figurative style-which is in itself explicit and easier to interpret than abstract-along with the titles of the works intentionally recalling lyrical masterpieces (another great passion of the artist), come to our aid.
Elias Naman is a taciturn person, one of those people who, to communicate, prefers expression, the body, the chisel to words, and, as is often the case with those who tend to shy away from the real world, internally he guards a fertile and tangled inner world, where ancestral drives (especially male-female dualism) lurk, which then explode in the worked marble of his sculptures.
Emotions
In one word (just one, perhaps trivial, but absolutely necessary to explain Elias’ artistic poetics): emotions.
Emotions emanate from the marble, in the expressions of a face, in a half-open mouth, in the muscular tension of an arm, in a gaze that wanders, far away.
In the path of transformation-often painful-that stylistically every artist must go through, over the years Elias has matured an awareness of his own technical skill, a technique understood here in the Greek meaning of the term, (techne = art connected to poiesis, that is, production, referring to an Indo-European root, tek = to weave). That is, the ability to make art, understood as a means of conveying emotions to the viewer.
If the artist began his journey with large sculptures portraying mostly a man and a woman (dualism), with the whole bodies often blurred by Michelangelo’s non-finite, gradually he has been lightening and focusing on feelings: the large sculptures have become fragments, irregularly shaped, the bodies have become body parts, details, enlargements, and the texture has become sharp, as if to capture and reflect all the power of light on the crystalline white marble.
Text by Elisabetta Maria Elena Buttiglione about the sculptor Elias Naman
Discover the artworks by Elias Naman: http://www.rossettiartecontemporanea.it/en/artist/naman-elias/
