SPACE AND LIGHT
For each of us – locals or tourists – there is “a point from which all distances begin. The place where you have tried and you have learned to fly. That is the birthplace.”[Toma George Maiorescu, 2009]. With the opening of the museum (June, 2012), Constantin Lucaci – “one of the greatest European sculptors” [Segato G., 2001] – returned to his birthplace, the town of Bocsa, where he was born on 7th of July 1923. On the way from Timisoara to Resita, you should stop in the centre of Bocsa at the “Constantin Lucaci” Museum, where you will float in the imponderability for many unmeasured moments, among the 17 pieces sculpted and donated by the Banat artist.
You will find it surprising that none of the sculptures bear a name. Constantin Lucaci did not name them, offering thus the visitor the joy of discovering them and seeking the revelation of his art of sculpting the light.
“If I gave a title to a work, I would limit the understanding, because the viewer would always turn to what the title says, not what the work says. It’s a new vision. It is very accustomed to offer verbally explanation to what is done in sculpture or painting. We, artists, think in images and not in words. The image must shape you, convince you, and have an affective charge. Of course, it is normal for every visitor to ask – But what does it represent? – It represents everything: fascination, mystery, infinite space, movement, light as essence, etc. That’s why I was appreciated by everyone, including the Vatican priests“, said the artist at the inauguration of the museum on June 5th 2012.
The Bocsa Museum is the second “Constantin Lucaci” museum in the world, the first one was opened in Italy on April 14th 2007, in the San Francesco di Paola Sanctuary, under the name “Racolta Constantin Lucaci”; it is a collection of 37 stainless steel sculptures under the aegis of the Vatican, Master Lucaci being the only Romanian artist who enjoys this privilege from the Holy Pope.
It is mindblowing when, entering the Bocsa museum, you can see for the first time the Constantin Lucaci’s stainless-steel metaphors in the “Space and Light” workshop. You receive clean, vibrant light to your soul, light that comes from cosmos, where there is no measure of earthly time and no space boundaries.
The landscape of the light master’s museum looks like the one from the native garden of plum trees at Bocsa, before sunrise. “Under the moonlight, the plum orchard looked like steel. Lunar landscape with metallic iridescence. “[Sgaverdia D, 2008].
Each piece in the museum realized either in zigzag or in spatial curves, or even stellar shapes in harmonious proportions, darts boldly the surrounding space having an unexpressed, unknown code that people can understand. It is a sculpture that reveals – through the planetary movement of shapes and the unspoilt music of the spheres – a new reality, the reality experienced by man as the aspiration of the escape from gravity, “above the Earth”. Look among the “flying stars and metal explosions” the rising star or the falling star, all enlivened by light and giving the eye a new salvation of the soul through art.
The art of Constantin Lucaci is full of hope and opposes any form of the perishable; not only because he was the first Romanian artist to use stainless steel in sculpture – the 18-8 steel-chromium-nickel combination – one of the discoveries of the twentieth century, but mostly through his thinking:
“All my life I was obsessed by sculpting the light. But not light in the banal sense – the opposite of darkness, but the light as the essence. The light that forms the base of the universe, because all stars are light constructions. I have sought to capture it and give it shape through metaphors. “[Sgaverdia D, 2008].
Among the stainless steel metaphors in the museum you will have the privilege of seeing some of the sculptor’s drawings. Constantin Lucaci is an excellent coal drawer; the artist always emphasizes that “drawing is the grammar of sculpture“.
Like any Romanian artist, Constantin Lucaci was more appreciated abroad than in Romania. The sculptor Constantin Lucaci is a Herder Prize winner – a Nobel Prize of the East – awarded in 1984 by the University of Vienna for his entire work. Recognition came after the sculptor opened the Venice Biennale twice (in 1976 and 1980) – the dream of any artist in the world – being an exception to the golden rule, according to which an art creator can only present once in a lifetime a personal exhibition at the biennial. By his works that “float in space”, Constantin Lucaci carries forward the legacy of Constantin Brâncuşi