At the beginning of the universe, Chaos was infinite; suddenly, Heaven and Earth separated, and Era came into form. The mystery of the creation is never solved, albeit countless people devoted their lives to it. In the west, ancient Greek sages tried to peep into the origin of all things with elements such as water, air, and fire. In the east, Laozi proposed Dao as the principle of the universe:
There was something undefined and complete,
coming into existence before Heaven and Earth.
How still it was and formless,
standing alone and undergoing no change,
reaching everywhere and in no danger of being exhausted.
It may be regarded as the Mother of all things.
While pioneers of philosophy and science pursue an ultimate explanation for the creation relentlessly, artists are no exception.
Undoubtedly, Mr. Ariel Moscovici, born in Romania and living in France for a long time, is an artist who has been exploring this issue for decades. It is also an uncanny bond that since 1995 he has been invited to visit Taiwan and create here several times. His sculptures, in the form of public art, are distributed in many places on the island, and some of them are already landmarks of landmarks. These artworks are: Home (National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, 1994), Oscillation (Hualien Cultural Center, 1999), Between Earth and Sky (Taipei 101, 2003), Between Two Points (Liyu Lake in Hualien, 2009), Axle Between Elements (Mabu Mountains in Beipu, 2010), A Moment of Eternity (National Dong Hwa University, 2012), Tower of Words A, Tower of Words B, and Between Past and Future (Taichung City Government, 2014), The Space Between (Nanliao, Hsinchu, 2017), The Eternal Return (Taiwan Taoyuan District Court, 2017), and Axle Between (Tunghai University, 2018).
In the past two decades, these artworks found their home one after another in Taiwan. It turns out that before we know it, he has already immersed us in his spiritual thoughts and meditations through his works.
Watching Mr. Moscovici’s outdoor sculptures always reminds me of the black extraterrestrial monolith in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, which can instantly evolve apes and transform humans. However, his works convey more force of “Chaos divided, Yin-Yang separated, and Cosmos founded”: they seem to be conglomerate blocks bursting out of the Chaos that holds a directionality. In his coordinate system set between two points and between Heaven and Earth, we as humans seem to enter the orbit of infinite spacetime and experience the constantly transforming life energy of the Cosmos in the irregular blocks of his works.
The exhibition Bereshit is made possible by the generous support of Ms. Nee Chen. Ms. Nee has spared no effort to promote art, and Providence University Art Center is one of her beneficiaries. It is an honor to have the opportunity to present Mr. Moscovici’s sculptures and related prints and drawings to the public. Here we want to express our deepest thanks to Ms. Nee. And we sincerely hope Mr. Moscovici, who has regarded Taiwan as his second homeland, continues to infuse this island with mighty cosmic energy in the future so that the echoes of Genesis keep rippling on this land!
When you blink your eyes, Demiurge is already there.
This master creator mentioned by Plato is always working, moving, designing, and building because the universe is still empty. His inspiration is sacred geometry. His tool is intention. His works are particles, crystal systems, and DNA, with which he can create an entirely new world by just a change in the combination and the angles of molecular structures.
Every artwork of Ariel Moscovici bears the imprint of Demiurge. Those alien-like sculptures and drawings are reminiscent of archetypes such as mountain, crystal, or seed and faintly evoke our remote collective memories. At that time, humans had not yet appeared. Even animals and plants were nowhere to find. We were just light, little shimmering light, without any pursuit or thought, just simply existing. Until one day, looking down at the land below that had just cooled down, we suddenly felt the urge to do something for it, and the mind was born.
We can find two dominant forces in his creations. One is forming, which is to determine roughly the shape of the work, and the other is carving, which is to work on details even to destroy the body to add more expressions. However, every carving is also a forming on another level. The purpose of destruction is to make room for creation. It is the alchemy of wounds. These two forces can start to interact at any point and work together dialectically and continuously to create endless possibilities.
Of course, sculpture as an art form is none other than an alternating game of forming and carving. However, in Moscovici's art that heavily reduces things to geometrical shapes, this feature of sculpture is lucid, straightforward, and powerful. His artworks demonstrate the magical and paradoxical mechanism of creation so baldly that they look minimal yet complicated, quiet yet ablare, natural yet high-tech. It is a demonstration of coincidentia oppositorum, which fascinates so many philosophers. One is two, and two is one. With this fuzzy logic, his art has thus become a metaphor for the creation of the universe.
But why did he make such art pieces? "I tried to imagine the inner space in the head of the creator (God or Nature), the place where the first movement occurred." This spell-like self-analysis gives us the key to his art warehouse.
The cosmic egg is a frequent theme in the creation myths of different cultures. In the ancient Greek and Hellenistic world, the Orphic Egg was a golden egg with a gigantic serpent called Ananke (necessity) wound around it. With a cracking sound shattering the silence, the androgynous God Phanes (light-bearer) came to the world. Barely out of the egg, he fluttered his golden wings wildly, sweeping the darkness away like a whirlwind, and then, in turn, created the other gods one by one.
This myth makes a perfect footnote to Moscovici's art and precisely explains why there are so many variants of egg shape in his works. Like some space-time biopsies, these art pieces are wombs, houses, temples, seats, holy grails, diamonds, planets, and UFOs. They are excellent objects of meditation. The more you look at them, the more fascinating they become, and you can almost hear a certain cosmic Om-sound. Once you notice an enigmatic detail, you are already sucked into the wormhole and teleported in a trance to somewhere else.
If you get the chance to meet the artist himself and chat with him, you can feel the pure angelic energy of his works more clearly. Angels are messengers of the Creator, and Moscovici's message might be the essential playfulness of creation.
All his works seem unfinished or stay in a chrysalis stage, quietly waiting for the coming metamorphosis. The dormant state also makes them look particularly spiritual and makes you wonder how they will develop next. Creation is never about completion but transformation. The inspiration behind these artworks might be Genesis, but in terms of aura and temperament, they are much closer to the Buddhist cosmology: there is neither naissance nor annihilation. The cycle of the four periods of the world—formation, continuance, decline, and disintegration—is nothing but a trick of energy transformation. If not perplexed by the vicissitudes of phenomena, we can see eternity, or the so-called oneness, in the moment.
Besides, do not forget his first name is Ariel, which means lion of God in angelology. Some documents of Gnosticism identify Ariel with Demiurge, and this Creator of the physical universe sometimes appeared bluntly with a lion head. All these coincidences make one smile, but perhaps there is no such thing as coincidence——all coincidences come from the inevitable serpent of necessity.
Browsing repeatedly the catalog of this exhibition, I feel like floating in the asteroid belt. Flying rocks of various shapes pass by, colorful and sublime. Suddenly these words pop out from nowhere:
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.
The author of this phrase is said to be Leonardo da Vinci.
Born in 1956, Bucharest, Roumania.
