Solid fragilities
The history of contemporary sculpture looks like a series of interrupted processes, with clear-cut, radical breaks that have opened new, fundamental directions in research, developing parallel to, simultaneously with, and often in competition with, the trends relating to well-tested techniques and materials.
Today, this has resulted in a comprehensive, all-inclusive definition of sculpture – which covers virtually any form of expression that involves plastic elaboration, regardless of formal type, production technique and working materials.
This comprehensive meaning of the term sculpture started to become current among artists and critics during the 1980s, after the post-modern cultural turn, which blurred the distinction between experimental products and the more ‘classic’ forms that were still in use during the 1960s and 70s.
It was the last season of the avant-garde, marked by the rise and affirmation of the new-dada, minimalist, pop, environmental, process-oriented, performance and conceptual trends.
Another feature that prevailed in the 20th century and continues to exist in the new millennium in the domain of plastic research is the final departure from the celebratory function, and the related loss of monumentality, along with its deictic element, the pedestal.
The sculpture of Aron Demetz is perfectly attuned to today’s international debate on sculpture: his plastic research has not abandoned its historical roots – anatomy, technical skill and materials – on the contrary, it has turned them into generators of new forms of experimentation.
This is to immediately clear up any prejudices that may arise when looking at harmonious sculptural forms that are still tied to anatomical, formal canons, and refer us back to the physical object without conceptual mediation.
Demetz’s work can be traced to the domain Francesco Poli refers to as ‘plastic form’1, the trend that carries the greatest historical weight. This definition includes any type of work made by directly cutting/carving marble or wood, modelling clay, wax, or plaster, and casting bronze and other metals. 
In this category we can rightfully include other forms of plastic work made with other materials, or spurious forms that combine materials of different origin, both natural and synthetic, such as sculptures trickled with resin.
The predominant theme here is the human figure, which remains inevitably linked to the idea of statue and of the human simulacrum in general, even when the topic is dealt with from a new perspective.
In Demetz the human figure is charged with a set of strong, ethical and existential connotations, which are fittingly and coherently matched by the production process and the tools he uses.
This process is inseparable from its formal results: process and product are two elements of the same creative genesis. 
In this generative process of the work, the level of content – the meaning the artist intends to convey through his work – turns out to be just as essential as the formal level of expression. 
The two are inextricably linked.
For Demetz, the expressive and qualitative value of the work originates in the importance and depth of content, as well as in the uniqueness and aesthetic effectiveness of the forms employed.
The artist tackles formal values without hesitation or prejudice, placing them, and the related notions of beauty and aesthetic pleasure, in the foreground.
These values have come again to the fore from the end of the 1970s,  with the fall of the common places derived from the avant-garde, crystallized by the opening of the post-modern age.
This stage of transition clearly marked a departure from Hegelian-inspired forms of inquiry into expression grounded on the theoretical construct of thesis-antithesis-synthesis – thus freeing art, at least partially, from the erosion process that was in action throughout the 20th century.
This process had led to the definition of sculpture as a Duchampian product, thereby inhibiting for a long time any analysis or approach to sculpture based on aesthetic and expressive norms.
After his education and professional debut in the 1990s, Demetz developed a deep awareness of all these elements, coupled with an in-depth understanding of the working procedures, which he has perfected through incessant practice. This allowed him to reach a very high degree of control on the making process.
This ‘craftsmanship’ he developed thanks to the centuries-old tradition of woodworking in Selva di Valgardena, which involves a perfect synergy between hands, head and imagination, according to the formula expressed by Richard Sennett in his Craftsman2.
The work of Aron Demetz can be inscribed in the circle of the combined evolution of mind and hand, prehension and apprehension (as described, again, by Sennett).
In this circle, each problem leads to reflection and action, which in turn generates new problems. “The good artist – we could say paraphrasing Sennett – uses his solutions to uncover new territory; problem solving and problem finding are intimately related in his or her mind”.
This process justifies the harmonious coexistence, in Demetz’s works, between anatomical knowledge, mastery of techniques and materials, and an inexhaustible, inextinguishable need for experimentation.
The same principle of dichotomous harmonization is connected to the oxymoron in the title of this text.
Frailty – a condition inherent in human existence, dramatically amplified by the present historical situation, and crystallized in solid sculptural forms.
A form of neo-monumentality, freed from celebratory purposes, where the celebration is entirely dedicated to the individual and existence.
The mechanism extends to the space the work is integrated into, which in turn becomes an integral part of the work itself, inseparable from the expressive plastic synthesis formulated by the author.
Demetz creates solid forms that are ‘thought machines’ with an aesthetic mechanism.
The solidity of form, indented by the action of fire, which penetrates deep into the structure of the work, gives its surface strong, hieratic connotations, and simultaneously invests it with an aura of unambiguousness, a lack of appendages or decorative structures.
A surface that only leaves room for active reflection, a state of sympathetic participation by the spectator, freed from passive contemplation.
Matter is brought back to an absolute state, reached through a process where nature – the trunk – is turned into culture in the course of the different working stages. These, in turn, embody the layering of the artist’s practical, anatomical and cognitive knowledge, taken back to a primordial state, even more essential than the natural element.
A ‘subtractive’ process, carried out through the use of fire, an element that is scarcely controllable, despite the skills Demetz has developed.
It is precisely this chance factor the artist is interested in – unpredictability, the uncontrollable, the ‘chance’ element inherent in the use of the flame, these elements are turned into as many co-authors of his work.
Demetz therefore introduces a ‘reality’ surplus, an open, unpredictable structure that gives the work an existential density, bringing a universal dimension to the artist’s individual reflection.
In the same way, the addition of resin and mushrooms is instrumental in the artist’s research process.
Resin as a therapeutic element, used by nature in the process of repairing the structural lesions of plant trunks, and mushrooms (the Pholiota Denuntians variety) as natural indicators of unstable and morbid conditions.
Demetz approaches frailty through a skilful use of natural elements, which he organizes with the help of his practical abilities – these elements are allegories of the precarious state and constant threat inherent in the dialectical relationship between nature and culture, and of the individual’s delusional will to control the environment and natural phenomena3.
Consciously, and with painstaking skill, Demetz carries out his deconstruction of natural processes – as metaphors of human existence – that involve both matter and technical means, which have to adapt symbiotically to the idea he wants to convey. 
Demetz reproduces and adapts the metamorphic mechanisms of reality, charging them with meaning, and at the same time engages in a battle against Chronos the tyrant, whom the artist fights with the weapons of form.
This form is often made essential, and weak, by fire, monitored and surveilled by mycotic elements, or soothed and reinvigorated by resin. A form of resistance against the self-destructive drive, the cupio dissolvi, which Demetz confronts with the spirit of a traveller. He is aware of the impossibility to stop time, but believes we cannot give up the need to perpetually create the new, to incessantly give life to utopia and open new paths. 
To create new spaces of solid harmony in the middle of extreme precariousness – this is the ultimate task of the artist, who takes it upon himself to carry it out, also on behalf of the other individuals.

	Alessandro Romanini

1 La Scultura del Novecento. Bari, Laterza, 2006.
2 Richard Sennett, The Craftsman, London and New Haven, Yale University Press, 2008.
3 On this topic see the illuminating book by Alan Weisman, The World without us, London, Thomas Dunne Books, 2007. Alternating narrative and a detailed scientific approach, the author describes the mechanisms by which nature would gradually and unrelentingly prevail over human creations – technological, urban and housing, once the human race would have disappeared from planet earth.