CECILIA MARTIN BIRSA AT MIAMI RIVER ART FAIR

I working stones in order to transform the stones into the human beings that definitively possess the secret of Universal Beauty: Women.

Cecilia Martin Birsa

You should become an artist” Placido Castaldi told me. And I listened to him. “Artist” Aldo Flecchia told me years later “ is rather presumptious, I consider myself to be simply a sculptor”. “History” assured Giorgio Perazzone, “ proves everyone of us right or wrong” Three people, three milelstones along my way.

“Are you able to live off art?” they often ask me: “ Certainly” I reply “ without it, I would only be surviving. From being a child I drew on a blackboard. In adolescence I designed my moods on billions of scraps of paper. During my frequent train journeys, I pestered the other commuters to let me draw them.

The most appreciative were the black women.

Placido Castaldi taught me preferably to draw and paint naturally. It was an honour for me to show together with him, in the Benedetto Croce library in Pollone. But, above all, he taught me to sculpture:- “You are born a sculptur, you do not become one” he repeated often. “look at the stone, observe it well, draw first, then work it. Since I discovered stone, I havent been able to put it down. River stones, hard as iron, unpredictable, with its inclusions it is a universe of colours and natural history, primordial, telling stories of hundreds of millions of years: of magma and the depths, of ice and of earth.

Creating a sculpture is for me a moment of deep concentration. Mucronite, serpentine or granite are not the same as clay or marble, to which excellent artists or sculptors impose soul and shape, but they need to be heard, to be , dialogued with, to be consistently researched, very similar to deciphering a form submerged in water.

I hide in the beauty of the stone, which has been waiting millions of years to become sculptur.

Cecilia Martin Birsa

Cecilia Martin Birsa says she cannot live with art – “without it I could only survive�.

It is precisely this unrenounceable urgency, such as breathing, which emerges in sculptures sculpting is a creative act made of concentration and extreme fatigue in which body and mind must travel hand in hand to match the plastic gesture, the creator, to the inspiration.

Gesture followed by another passage: one molds interiority, just as it has acted on matter. A virtuous circle of interpenetrations is born, in which the artist rediscovers her inner identity through a constant, tiring, but inalienable dialogue with the stone block. The stone worked by Cecilia, almost always gives life to feminine forms, in a reverberation of inner and outer reflections.

Cecilia Martin Birsa gives us authentic and primordial emotions that take inspiration directly from the four elements: air, water, earth and fire.

From the heart of the earth, the fire has given rise to a tear of incandescent lava expelled directly from the belly of the earth: volcanic bomb from which the perfect face of Black Woman takes shape: a creature of fire and harbinger of strong emotions in us too we find admiring its dark and primitive shapes.

From a peridotite rock smoothed by the waters of a torrent for centuries the figure of Nudo nella Lama has been freed; here the stone has entered so much in symbiosis with the aquatic element that it has retained its reverberation in its color.

The knot reveals itself in a contorted female nude in its painful rethinking itself, blocked and burdened in that instant of extreme stasis, only apparently without exit, but which, instead, precludes a rebirth like a new bud that emerges from ground after a severe winter so our soul will also be able to free itself and bloom again.