Performance live: Elias Naman
15 May @ 18:00 - 19 May @ 19:30
LIVE SCULPTING by Elias Naman
The artist Elias Naman will be in residence at the gallery to create his three-dimensional sculptures in Carrara marble live. A sculptor of Syrian origin, he works—as was customary in the past—using only a chisel to shape blocks of Carrara marble, the finest stone whose history echoes through the centuries. Naman does not produce any drawings or models, but surrenders to his unusual affinity with the cold material to reveal what it conceals.
A unique opportunity to experience hand-crafted sculpture, transforming raw material into a figure.
THE ARTIST
Elias Naman was born in Yabroud (Syria) in 1980.
After graduating from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Damascus, he arrived in Italy in 2003 and enrolled at the Accademia di Carrara, where he obtained his four-year degree in 2009 and, in 2011, specialised in sculpture with top marks.
He has always favoured the figurative style and works marble exclusively by hand, without the aid of machinery, just as Michelangelo did over five hundred years ago.
His working method draws on tradition and classical principles: he works directly from the block of marble without the use of a model or drawings.
“For Elias Naman, marble is a living, sensitive substance. A voice to be listened to and transferred into the soul, to combine the spirit of classicism with the deepest emotional impulses.
Indeed, whether he carves and shapes the white Carrara marble or the grey Bardiglio, symphonic voluptuousness emerges from his hands, combining the spirit of classicism with the emotional impulses aroused by the state of grace of every age.
His is truly a ‘heroic endeavour’, for even today he does not shy away from evoking, through his artistry, time-honoured memories of ancient drapery, only to direct the remainder of the narrative not towards the concreteness of a figure to be represented, but towards the nostalgic flight of a dream to be pursued in the course of an ethereal evolution that ideally extends beyond the work itself.”
(Elisabetta Buttiglione)
