The sculpture
Sculpture as passion. From the sign and from the pictorial colour, an imagery that dilates by gathering objects and scraps from the real world, to recompose new ones. Different views transfigure so that changing installations where flowers and fish live suspended between water, sky and land live together. Or in beautiful owls, women-birds, pigeons’, tender daily monsters to bear witness of the long imaginary osmosis that Gesine Arps’ mind gives us. Even the trees live her world and dress up in order to project poetic words.
I believe that in this world it’s “chance” that governs our existence and all things...From chance to chaos an infinite number of luminous paths emerge. This way, the artist as the poet, know how to see the right and perfect one.They measure and calculate subconsciously the time given in order to transposition into art. And their hand chooses and recomposes making new presences come true. But “chance” always determines and deplores our destiny.
It is as if Gesine Arps gives us a lost identity to her characters, to the protagonists of her dreams. In choosing she goes back to the beginnings and it’s her third eye guiding her hands as if holding a divining rod. She works in the fine lands of fantasy with an ethical consciousness that together with the aesthetic one in a light state of awareness able to redeem new beauties and rediscover the richness of diversity and the wonder of compassion.
Mind and heart in tune, starting from a simple gesture: for example, picking up a twig on a bottle washed up by the tide, rediscovering a piece of glass, a rusted piece of iron, a metal plate in a dump or recovering old dirty coloured rags that she herself used to clean her paint brushes with, in her studio in Cartoceto...
Gesine Arps’s mind has clear light. She “sees”. And her mind is pure as is her spiritual and artistic path.These joyous sculptures are set in a new dimension of beauty.They are works of intense feeling and poetic significant that come to us from the invisible. They are recognizable in the light of things called new life, as in the deep shadowy areas.
The imagination has this miraculous faculty of renovation.This way the unspeakable can make our heads spin with meaning out of all proportions. Gesine Arps transmutes the ordinary into the extraordinary. This is the magic of art. Therefore, even in her sculptures, sounds and biblical harmonies in virtue of grace, become brothers and sisters. The transience of the parts that make up and give back life to things is always experiencing form: silent, meditative, contemplative. The “interactive” dialogue that the artist has with the public and her works turns out to be always interesting: active and ritualistic participation is requested like the lighting of candles for a great sun disc; or sometimes the coins thrown in the great fish pond or the creation of a small door in the big “pigeonhole” to collect messages and prayers. «Bringing art to rituality. Being active makes you participate and makes you join the art work twice as much », claims Gesine Arps. This way we can choose if to participate actively, or remain rapt and touched in ourselves or decide to listen with attention...in static suspension.
The miracle of this diversified joyful path, after the sliding loss of transitoriness, reconciles us to the existence and to the consistence of overcoming pain and isolation from life.
Gesine’s sculpture work of art recomposes the possibility of existence of parts and materials that had extinguished a first apparent view of reality, as in a great puzzle.The artist overcomes the detachment and the loss through an emotional assembly of fragments. Sometimes the refined taste of decoration comes up having roots in her early ceramic experimentation. She finds a sort of pop art and nouveau realism there that recalls Niki de Saint Phalle’s nanas – those gigantic multicoloured female figures, primordial goddesses structured as angels in heaven. Niki belongs to childhood memory: her works inhabit the lands of her home land, Hannover. Same vital Energy. And more, we find assonance again in the Major Arcana Tarots cards. But since «art is a dream longer than the night» according to the title of a film by Saint Phalle, its rumblings go back to Tinguely, Gaudì e Schwitters... With the certainty that everything in Gesine Arps rises and transmutes, it changes in the subsidence of life that becomes “art of living” by substantiating itself differently, now in the colours of the painting, now in the forms of sculpture, now in the unfathomable reverberations of the poetic world.
Marisa Zattini,
d'après Voyages vers la lumière, II, 154-155.
"I work on sculptures and installations. When you're preparing the work for an installation, the word speaks for itself, you install something insto space. You work in contact with a space. When I'm invited to cultural exhibitions, I work inside and outside a building. I try to feel its energies, then I intervene. It often happens that it is the space itself that inspires me, it makes me understand something [...].".
Gesine Arps,
d'après Voyages vers la lumière, II, 150
