ICARO | CUT | HOLE

Notes, intuitions, markings on an extroverted surface of clay.

In the seven ceramic panels on display, Livio Stabile ponders the human longing to soar above the weight of existence to seek glimpses of ultimate truths through the symbolism of the Icarus myth.  

In order to escape the labyrinth, we – like Icarus – must risk all to fly through the portal of light. We achieve greater complexity and higher consciousness by passing through portals: voids, holes, cuts, lacerations. These states of primordial matter, these tasking mindscapes are clearly manifest in the two works, Cut and Hole, flanking the centerpiece, Icaro, which depicts Icarus the bird-man alchemist flying into the sun.

Stabile’s gestural strokes of yellow glaze juxtaposed with pink lacquer wrap Icarus’s wings like dense vapors of melting wax. A pink-bliss fog of doubt, as Stabile puts it. What confronts us in this risk-laden flight is not us versus the world but us versus ourselves. An inner struggle catalyzes change in the state of our consciousness. Each time we venture forth we create and experience a new reality. A new us.

We are the music makers

And we are the dreamers of the dreams

We are the music makers

And we are the dreamers of the dreams

[Richard D. James | AFX, Selected Ambient Works 85-92, 1992]

This extreme exposure of ourselves is ferocious and paradoxical. To take this transformative leap, one must embrace death for love of life. Being dead and alive are entangled states, Stabile speculates, as each state is correlated with and dependent on the other in a mythical time of fluid becoming, even as the total system remains static, timeless.

In the works on display, the Omega Point of French thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) is echoed. Teilhard noted: “Tout ce qui monte, converge” (Everything that rises converges). By the term Omega Point he invoked this culmination of an ever more complex consciousness that we develop through the process of life, creating reality, resulting in an encompassing spiritual convergence.

This state of flux transforms the no’s we say through life into creative acts of discontinuity, of self-removal and unconditional love for otherness. Out of this love, seeking to make room for novelty, Stabile subtracts chunks of clay in the two panels Cut and Hole. The clay, mounted on 12-gauge hot-rolled steel plates, is worked by knives and needles (Icaro), bare-handed slashes (Cut), or lifted as if the interior edges were veils (Hole). In each work the artist performs an act of subtraction. The removal of clay makes the works literally and conceptually lighter, opening them up to sunlight, hopefully taking the viewer, the sunseeker, a humble step closer to the Omega Point.

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