[attach id=274633 size="medium"]Aliases, by Mario Agius.[/attach]
The qualities of Mario Agius’s sculpture in wood and stone – massive, robust, strong, heavy and primitive – expose the nature, notion, vision and concept in his work.
His recent collection of sculptures, Rinascita, exhibited at the Cavalieri Hotel in St Julian’s, is not only unique, but demonstrates a re-thinking in his mission – from a craftsman commissioned to carve church furniture to a master convinced to etch his name in history and create museum pieces. Such ambition is not beyond his capability.
His exhibition – exciting and impressive – projects his character and reveals his environment. Born in an agricultural and farming community, Agius’s work could be termed ‘provincial’ or in peasant-soldier style, as described by the renowned Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli in his volumes on Roman Classical sculpture.
The expressive grimace in the face, the distorted posture and the ‘monstrous beauty’ reveal his romantic vision. Romanesque distortion of form and shape is the basis of Agius’s art.
Agius is an eclectic, and is influenced by various sources and styles from ancient sculpture to Classical Greek and Roman.
He also finds his influence in that most radical development of classical-expressive Barbarian vision, as evolved under the Longobards who, with great vigour, fused Germanic, Longobard tribal culture and art.
His work extols the dignity of the human form in its vicissitudes
This is the streak Agius inherited. Whether he did so consciously or not is immaterial, but it makes his work vigorous and expressive. There is restlessness in movement and an almost aggressive boldness in the nature of his works.
Realistic, but shorn of detail, Agius aims at simplicity. He hardly alters the shape of the log or stone, thus exploiting its natural dynamic form. Agius loves life, and his work extols the dignity of the human form in its vicissitudes.
His exhibition is a hymn to nature, poetic and lyrical; it is universal in content and message.
It is about birth, death and rebirth, about pain and joy, about hope and despair.
But perhaps, the pathology of human suffering is his forte, the result of his humble approach and acute wisdom garnered through stark experience.
The atrocious pain of humanity is highly exploited in the harder type of upper globigerina. Agius is richly creative in the way he exploits our honeycombed globigerina with a vermiculated surface, known locally as xehda għasel.
Representative is the David, whose hair is untouched honeycombed globigerina, while the facial features are finely carved into a grimace that immediately echoes that of St Proclus by Michelangelo in the Piccolomini Chapel in San Domenico, Bologna.
Il-Kommunità is a public sculpture set in the Gozo Channel Terminal, Mġarr – a massive and robust work carved in lime wood, inspired by the prehis-toric sculpture found during archaeological excavations at the Xagħra Stone Circle.
To say that it is monumental is an understatement. Torso, in olive wood, shows the provincial vigour and expressiveness of female anatomy.
The whole exhibition is a forceful statement by a powerful sculptor.