Between Heaven And Earth With Berlinde De Bruyckere's Angels.

 ‘Berlinde De Bruyckere. City of Refuge III’, Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, 20 April – 24 November 2024. Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia © Berlinde De Bruyckere. 
 

By SABRINA ROMAN May 16, 2024 

“Curiosity is the essence of human existence. Who are we? Where are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? I don’t know” wrote Gene Cernan. “I don’t have any answers to those questions. I don’t know what’s over there around the corner. But I want to find out.” On the other hand, Berlinde De Bruyckere, in taking flight on the wings of “love and suffering, danger and protection, life and death”, has found a place for herself by removing herself. Not so much as she welcomes neither the former nor latter but more so because she espouses, one would say capitulates to, an intermediary presence between both, first and foremost by acknowledging their being one and the same.

It comes across as predictable, perhaps even efficaciously inevitable therefore, that temporality along with immortality, would be sacrificed on the creative alter that consequently resurrects ‘City of Refuge III’ with its seraph beings who are positioned as, shrouded, faceless and congregated amongst the sweeping columns along with marmoreal curvatures of Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore; thus consummating the gospels of piety, ascendancy and impermanence that the artist has consecutively sought to venerate. Both throughout her earlier projects, particularly within ‘A simple prophecy’, and to a similar degree when it concerns this ongoing, more contemporary one, born from a joint effort with the Benedicti Claustra Onlus and it’s director, Carmelo A. Grasso who forms the curatorial team beside Ory Dessau and Peter Buggenhout.

‘Berlinde De Bruyckere. City of Refuge III’, Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, 20 April – 24 November 2024. Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia © Berlinde De Bruyckere.

Although, where the latter ensures to distinguish itself lies in the autonomy of belief it ultimately cedes to the observer, to put it bluntly, these sculptures, despite being largely indecipherable, come across as purposely conveying that whilst belief isn’t dependent on religion, religion is more so a matter of belief; contrary at it may seem considering that the ingenuity behind them was largely born from De Bruyckere finding her first mythical muse in Giorgione’s ‘Cristo morto sorretto da due angeli’ (1502-1510). In the same breath, or more appropriately ‘verse’ in this circumstance, the originator also strives and succeeds in, performing a gospel of her own, and yet it’s the incorporation of corporal, yet preternatural elements, by way of wax, and cow-skin moulded shrouds that crescendos this reading into an indictable service where heaven, purgatory and hell serve as her idiosyncratic holy trinity.

‘Berlinde De Bruyckere. City of Refuge III’, Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, 20 April – 24 November 2024. Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia © Berlinde De Bruyckere.

Finding life in such, each archangel is positioned to loom over their observer, whilst their toes, precariously balanced on the periphery of their platforms, a gesture that inevitably suggests they are neither here, nor there, coming nor going. More pertinently, these figures are simultaneously presented to us as being neither confined nor unfettered, they are the determinators of their providence to the same degree we can envisage them as having crashed through the domed ceiling of their resting place before mustering with the chorus’ of other heavenly hosts who’ve been orchestrated by everybody from Gian Lorenzo Bernini (‘The ecstasy of St. Theresa’ 1644-52) and Giotto (‘Crying Angels’ 1305-13) to Raphael (‘The Saint Madonna’ 1515-16) and Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (‘St. Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy’ 1595). However, in comparison to those painted by Brenda Wilkinson, in her magnum opus ‘Angels in Art’, these creatures seem tormented by their purgatory existence. They are a far cry from their winged contemporaries, who she contends, carry the missive that “goodness will prevail”, whilst also having the omnipotence to “bridge the gulf between God and man, heaven and earth.” 

‘Berlinde De Bruyckere. City of Refuge III’, Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, 20 April – 24 November 2024. Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia © Berlinde De Bruyckere.

The incorporation of reflectors is what decidedly makes ‘City of Refuge III’ bend the proverbial knee to Hermes Trismegistus’ “that which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above” and to a greater degree, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s “man is a little world - a microcosm inside the great universe. Like a fetus, he is suspended, by all his three spirits, in the matrix of the macrocosmos; and while his terrestrial body is in constant sympathy with its parent earth, his astral soul lives in unison with the sidereal anima mundi. He is in it, as it is in him, for the world-pervading element fills all space, and space itself, only shoreless and infinite.”

That De Bruyckere sought to particularly employ wax, recognised as being susceptible to bearing the passing signatures of time, similarly to the crow's feet and grey we inevitably wear, only catapults this into a greater focus, from every conceivable perspective, coincidental or not. Needless to say, her exploration of luminescence, which, in this circumstance, inundates through the panes of the benedictine church, only serves to bless this with an exacerbated exuberance.  

In comparison to its celestial counterparts that rose from the various, numinous fountains that give this creative endeavour its effervescence, a group of. lightning-split, cripple-wood tree trunks, positioned as if they were resting after bearing observance to numerous mortal coils, lie inside the sacristy, whilst propped up on welding surfaces. In an assurance of Hauser & Wirth’s declaration that De Bruyckere’s endeavours “surpass theological connotations, transferring them to the realm of the universal and profane.”At this point, we don’t need any further persuasion to sing from the same hymn sheet. WM

Berlinde De Bruyckere’s ‘City of Refuge III’ is displayed at Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, 20th April - 24th November 2024.