La Jornada: Lapidarium, by Gustavo Aceves, “appeals to the dignity of the human being”

The sculptural ensemble Horses of Saint Mark of Venice It was exhibited in Mexico in 1981 after a final journey around the world. The Mexican artist Gustavo Aceves (CDMX, 1957) was impacted by these pieces and they inspired him years later for his monumental project stonemason as “leitmotif of something much more important: the migratory phenomenon.”

The painter advanced The Day in an interview that he plans to bring this exhibition in public spaces to Mexico, as the last stop, in 2029, after a successful tour through the Italian cities of Pietrasanta, Rome and Berlin, and, soon, Athens, Istanbul and New York.

Migration has been present in every part of this project, conceived as a work in progress, that is linked and adapted to its environment. In every city he has played, he has had an enthusiastic reception from the public.

The sculpture project aims to create “empathy towards the migrant, at a time when ICE (the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service) carries out actions of enormous gravity: children separated from their parents and broken families in the face of the indifference of almost everyone,” said its author.

Francesco Buranelli, director of the Vatican Museums in 2011, chose the Mexican creator at the time to participate in the Venice Biennale. A stonemason was the resulting work. The Italian described it as “a reflection on an essential theme in the history of humanity: migration. Faced with the uncontrollable barbarism of our time, Aceves appeals to the dignity of the human being through the overwhelming message of his art.”

He continued: “the unprecedented cruelty and violence of the Spanish Conquest, never forgotten in the collective imagination of Mexicans, emerges again from the depth of Aceves’ ancestral memories when he places the horse on a symbolic scaffolding, a boat, a memory of the Spanish galleons and the conquest of Mesoamerica, but also an image of the native canoe of the Niger and of the shipwrecked barges in the waters of the Mediterranean.”

Upon taking charge of the Vatican Museums, Aceves traveled with the photographer Gabriela Malvido to Africa and the images she captured became a reference. On that continent, the creator devised his proposal, born from the question that the horses exhibited in the main temple of the city are a symbol of Venice, where there are no horses.

In the painter’s mind the relationship was created: “Venice is the horses. Saint Mark (patron of the city) is shipwrecked there. He went to Alexandria. I went to Alexandria. The puzzle began to come together with the shipwreck, the horses, the boat and I decided to go to Italy to make sculptures of horses. When I thought about the project, those of Saint Mark that I saw in Mexico City, which they brought when I was young, came by association. This is “Stonesmith”.

The artist, in the declaration of principles about the great exhibition, stated: “Stonesmith was born as a project in the waters of the Niger / a boat loaded with men, women and children, half Charon’s boat, half Trojan horse. / A stonemason It is a mute/silent testimony like the silence of immigrants halfway along the road.

“Each sculpture in A stonemason It is an obituary / the total of them forms an obituary. / A stonemason It is not an archeology of human migrations. / A stonemason It is a rereading of that new lexicon that begins with the B of Barbarian and ends with the X of Xenophobia / and between them, as an ignominious bridge, / the S of the undocumented (undocumented).”

From being a painter, Gustavo Aceves assumed to express himself through sculpture with A stonemason. “I conceive painting as something much more private. On the other hand, sculpture needs a public space, where people without exclusive training can contemplate a work and reflect on it.

“I have perceived with these exhibitions in different public squares that personal experience determines the degree of understanding one has. The intuitive part that makes people perceive that something serious is being talked about is undeniable. If they don’t have answers, at least they start asking questions.”

The origin of the project is “the wandering, the journey, the daring to reach the other shore. We are talking about the culture of the West, the debt it has with the original cultures,” commented Aceves, for whom the value of art is that “it serves to humanize man”, which will consequently produce a more peaceful society.

Gustavo Aceves mentioned that he thought about Saint Mark’s Horses to “talk about migration, because it embodies mobility, looting, war loot and a certain dispossession” due to its movement for centuries. The set was stolen from the Greek city of Corinth by the invaders of Rome and then taken to Istanbul. Other military campaigns took it as loot for Venice and Napoleon’s France, whose fall meant the return to the Italian city.

The work had a last exhibition tour in the 80s of the last century, before being confined in the Basilica of San Marcos. It passed through London, Paris, New York and Mexico City, brought by Fernando Gamboa to the Museum of Modern Art.

The exhibition A stonemason It is titled like that, the creator said, because that word names the space in museums like those of the Vatican or the Louvre, where fragments of sculptures that cause indifference, but cannot be discarded, are kept. “They are a problem more than a heritage. To evoke the migration phenomenon this idea was perfect: ‘something that is a problem that must be solved.'”

Aceves’ sculptures mix the Greek aesthetics of the horses of San Marcos with elements of African peoples; for example, a primitive boat from that continent and from the ceiling of the cave of a person from the Dogon people, “with stones that look like skulls. I take them back to add them to the horses,” explained the artist.

Another motif is a type of mast erected on the back of one of its figures. It represents an ancient mechanism used in Africa to close homes. “I used it as a metaphor for the migrant, who cannot take his house and, at least, takes the ‘lock’.”

Aceves pointed out that his horses are unique and irreproducible, like individuals. The materials were changing. He began with waste that washed up on the beach, such as fragments of wood, rags and wires, and then used bronze and marble.

It was in the Italian city Pietrasanta where the project materialized, in 2014. A year later, it was carried out in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, to commemorate the end of the Second World War with a series of monumental works. In 2016 it presented another stage of A stonemason in the Imperial Forum, in Rome.

Pietrasanta, known for its sculpture since the Middle Ages, is close to Carrarra, where Michelangelo obtained the marble blocks for his emblematic pieces. The Mercy and the David, and for the Medici Chapel. There, Aceves lived for a while and made a model of 200 horses that has guided him ever since. The 80 centimeter pieces have become works of five meters and more, in bronze, marble and cast iron.

Unusual exhibitions

On the first installation of stonemason In that Italian city, the artist placed marble blocks totaling 130 tons to “sail a monumental 12-meter white bronze horse. The monoliths were selected to give the sensation of waves.”

In the case of Berlin, where the exhibition had the subtitle of The origin of the tragedy, The horses were installed on train tracks to represent the victims of the Holocaust who were carried on railways to their end. One of the pieces in front of the Brandenburg Gate had numbers tattooed that refer to the extermination camps.

The installation on that site was unprecedented, which had not received any work since the time of Hitler, since it had to have the agreement of the four countries that won the war: Russia, England, France and the United States, which Aceves did obtain.

In Rome, the artist had the privilege of installing a public sculpture in front of the Colosseum, which had not been allowed since the time of Nero. For that stage of the exhibition, subtitled Waiting for the barbarians, He created works of cast iron with a red color similar to that of the bricks in Trajan’s market. “People at the Imperial Forum believed they were horses that had been rescued from the site itself,” Aceves recalled.

He announced that his next exhibition in Greece, where Pentelic marble prevails, “the sculptures will be 80 percent of that material. The theme will be The Odyssey, but without men, without Ulysses, but with female protagonists, who represent very interesting things.”

In Istanbul, due to the Byzantine culture marked “by gold, mosaic, etc., the horses will be completely different. London is much more industrial. In Mexico I am not going to say what they will be”; Gustavo Aceves explained.

European art criticism has recognized in Aceves’ colossal project elements such as the loving impact on consciousness, the union of ethics and aesthetics, the return to beauty and inner peace, and his challenge to the “prevailing destructive nihilism.”

The critic Jorge Juanes noted about the pieces: “horses that have marks on their skin and carry in their entrails the memory of the barbarism that presided and presides over the history of the human race: numbers marked on the symbolic bodies of the animals placed, sacrificial hearts, human skulls.”

The expert Claudio Strinati sees in A stonemason “the great monumentality that belonged to the classical world, where the image of the horse is one of the most prominent symbols of the history of humanity itself. Its message is universal although it is directed, above all, to the world of the defeated, of migrants, of those who have lost everything.”

Separately, Claudio Parisi Presicce, Capitoline Superintendent of Cultural Assets of Rome, stated that “Aceves’s work grows at each stage – which left Pietrasanta in 2014 and has already been launched on this journey around the world – perhaps to make the voice of his message heard more strongly in each place where he stops. A cry of art provoked by an army of horses, a symbol of freedom, of fierce strength and beauty, of sovereignty and victory. But also of defeat, pain and death.”

Meanwhile, the writer and editor María Virginia Jaua asserts that of the stone-masonry “At the same time, it participates in the cultural heritage of humanity and puts into crisis the injustices committed by the guardians of the Apocalypse and their accomplices.”