From Venice to Lucca. Aron Demetz 2009-2011
	Luca Beatrice

I Fell Into A Burning Ring Of Fire
I Went Down, Down, Down
And The Flames Went Higher
Johnny Cash, Ring of Fire, 1963

Sculpture, even more than painting, had to undergo a process of hybridization in order to ‘resist‘ the attack of contemporary languages, each time blending with object, installation, design, video, performance, and various other disciplines. Today, very little is left of the historical dogma, according to which sculpture had to be an artifact produced by an author, who faithfully adheres to his materials, knows them and masters them. The stereotype of the sculptor with large hands, physically strong, poisoned by dust and debris, sometimes unfit to be seen in public, has been replaced by an ‘engineer‘ of art, capable of supervising workers, directing craftsmen, and deciding when his project has reached the definitive form he had in mind.
This change of perspective, and somehow also the change in the image of the sculptor, has gone hand in hand with another pressing question about the role of sculpture as a contemporary art. In a few years we will celebrate one hundred years of Duchamp‘s Ready Made: which may not have been the first actual ready-made to earn immediate acclaim by virtue of the artist‘s demiurgic will, but was certainly the revolutionary act which, by overturning our perspective, led us into the XX century, the century of the contemporary. After that gesture it seemed really difficult for ‘figurative sculpture‘, or at least the representation of reality through a simple image, to retain its active, relevant role: why try hard to copy something when the debate has moved elsewhere? From the Bicycle Wheel onwards, everything has suddenly grown old: Michelangelo and Canova, Rodin and Picasso, masterpieces by great masters, belonging to history but impossible to connect with the urgency 
of the present.
Art (not all art) does not slavishly follow the timeline of evolution. Such as statement, however, is dangerous, because it involves the risk of ‘ghettoizing‘ those important heterodox experiences that have selected ‘marginal‘ modes of expression, moving away from tradition. Working with figurative sculpture involves a strong risk of being anti-contemporary – and yet there are different artists, revered by the international art system, who have chosen this language without worrying too much about it: Stephan Balkhenol, Marc Quinn, Thomas Schütte, Juan Munoz (who passed away in the early 1990s) are the first examples of contemporary superstars to be included in the most important international museums, and nobody would even think about downgrading them to the lower rank of figurative sculptors who express themselves through a clichéd or mannered art form – although it is not always easy to grasp the difference between them and their conceptually less sophisticated colleagues.
Aron Demetz rightfully belongs to this first group of artists, and this is the reason why I did not hesitate to select him for the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2009. Despite his young age (the ‘ripening time‘ is usually longer for sculpture than for other languages), the artist from Val Gardena showed to have reached full maturity several years ago – above all, he had the ability to bring up urgent questions about the present while turning to the figurative tradition, even blending it with the style of local craftsmen, who choose wood as their only working material. His brilliant intuition was to regard the “short production chain“ as an added value, not a limit. As opposed to today‘s trend in young Italian art, of competing for a position within the global system, developing a generic ‘international style‘, Demetz insists on his own cultural roots as the starting point  that really makes the work necessary. At the Arsenale he presented a giant installation comprised of nine rough wood and resin sculptures. Reflections on the human being were again at the core of his poetic discourse. 
Does sculpture, in this case, simply represent, say, or better evoke, something else?
We know that any way of making contemporary art in the present must come to terms with minimalism and the definitive dematerialization of the object that climaxed at the end of the 1960s. Aside from the reference to the realistic image, there is a much greater distance between an ordinary figurative sculptor and Demetz than between the latter and a Carl Andre floor piece or a Hamish Fulton walk in the woods. For sculpture is nothing but the accomplishment of a project that involves direct experience, life, existential research. These artists tell the story of wood, of a stone or a stream, they talk about the difficult relationship between our human species and nature, they ask themselves questions about respecting raw materials, not altering the environmental balance, about how far their intervention can go, or to what extent the pre-existing form is already a sculpture, a work in itself.
In the works he exhibited in Venice, Aron Demetz introduced a an element of change and transition – the resin dripping, which he treats as pigment, color, pouring it on the head and trunk of his fleshed-off figures. Like a modern-time Thoreau, he talks about walking in the woods, obsessively searching for an element that can still be used and manipulated. The space around his works is filled with a strong smell, the same that comes out of the lesions found on plants, which can be induced or spontaneous. A lesion is a wound – and art cannot exist safe from inner suffering.
Demetz‘s experience at the Italian Pavilion, shortly after his personal exhibition at Milan‘s PAC, led him to take a further qualitative leap, as shown by the many different works he has created during the last two years, which were mostly exhibited at Villa Bottini in Lucca. The crucial motivation was the use of fire, the purifier, the element whose power could destroy everything - stopped one moment before, when it is still a color: black. Now sculpture blends with performance – a private performance, though, with no spectators – to emphasize the artist‘s essential face-to-face relationship with nature. A tongue of fire burns, forming a ring as in Johnny Cash‘s song, a burnt house (recalling, although only by iconic echo, Martin Honert‘s Fire installation of 1992), the same absolute black, dark and definitive, as in the extraordinary works of Nunzio, whom I regard as the greatest Italian abstract sculptor, Demetz being his counterpart in the figurative domain. In other works, Aron comes back to the tree, the root, the matrix, evoking the timeless work of Penone. Finally, the wooden skin of the new figures shows strange viral growths, mushrooms that come out of our body, soon taking away the perfection of youth. The ability to arrive at the essence of things by talking about the human being – this is the poetic hallmark of Aron Demetz.