About

Alexis Rago's sculptures are elaborated on many levels reflecting his eclectic cultural background and influences. His pieces do not sit still in a specific cultural context but travel back and forth on journeys that cross time and disciplines. This intensely visionary work comments on our place in the universe all the more powerfully for the absence of overt human iconography. Questions of origin, purpose and means are investigated in this imaginative, alien, world. It is no coincidence that these sculptures remind us of the fossil record in some dist ant future, built with mathematical formality yet full of fragile tenderness.

By reverting to the most primitive of materials, clay, we are invited to reconnect with nature. He envisions the primeval ooze undergoing a reverse transmogrification by hand and heat in a symbolic process that has scientific and philosophical significance. The convergence of science, art and religion come naturally together in an exposition of a belief synchronous with the human condition today where we now feel on the threshold of great changes to Humankind the kind of which, for the first time in history we acknowledge not to be of divine origin. His way of working embodies the struggle of our time to keep embedded in the present whilst being true to oneself.

We can take these sculptures as votive offerings or fetishes obstinately marked and measured with devotion. The skeletal objects appear vulnerable and durable at the same time. It is as though the internal workings of living entities have been turned inside out and exposed to a process of petrification. However, we must not lose sight of the delight they offer and the humour with which they are often entitled, the artist perhaps taunting us with the fragility of human conventions in a post-apolcalyptic assertion that our deepest meaning if not purpose is to bear witness to our own existence and that of all Creation.

Alexis Rago was born…more