The Agitated Angel

/, Literature, Blesok no. 13/The Agitated Angel

The Agitated Angel

The Work

#7 Following the examples of the divine Michelangelo and the virtuoso Gianlorenzo Bernini, Tome Serafimovski is not just an author, but a first-rate event in his own social environment. The archives and the libraries have already gathered numerous responses and reactions to his work. There is no doubt that the number of published or unpublished articles about him and commentaries on his work is so large that it would be an interesting endeavor to collect these comentari inediti and prepare them for an integral publication.
Tome Serafimovski creates in Macedonia. In conditions of general hypnosis with power and greatness, he works in a country whose dimensions and power are not something to boast about. Hence, contemporary Macedonia is often described as a kind of exotic residue, as a relic of some long-forsaken practices of life or, at best, as a kind of museum of its previous glory. Regarding the arts, many people in the world see Macedonia as playing a provincial role, imitating modern movements with inferiority, or possessing the syndrome of lethargic obsession with its past, insensitive to its present or future prospects. However, the notion that centers of culture, as well as centers of political power, of academic concentration and economic wealth have long been displaced from Macedonia and from the Balkan region, no matter how well-grounded it may be, is unsound and not completely true. Even in its most difficult times Macedonia has neither lost its artistic ingenuity, nor descended to the level of servile imitation.
#8 On the contrary, in the past several decades, Macedonia has undoubtedly demonstrated an enormous power of invention that has surpassed the proportions of its size and its social and political level of organization and power. Even in the strictest sense of the word, the artistic authenticity it has displayed cannot be questioned, whether it be its music, its literary output or its visual arts. In this context, Macedonian sculpture has obtained a prominent position, and Tome Serafimovski is one of its foremost protagonists. The evaluation of his sculptural work wins over one of the key arguments which claims that the arts of small nations are “necessarily epigonic” in character, especially if the term “epigone” is defined according to its classical meaning: “a less successful follower of a successful generation.” Macedonian arts show their authenticity in a number of works, and in the opus of Tome Serafimovski it is revealed unmistakably, genuinely showing its key aesthetic phases – from inspiration to final realization.
#1 Even in works where the motifs are so universal that they hardly allow any individual interpretation, particularly those that breathe in a recognizable environment or artistic tradition (“A Girl with a Flower,” “After Bathing,” Erotica 1,” “Erotica 2,” etc.), the sculptures of Tome Serafimovski are undoubtedly his sculptures, and undoubtedly – Macedonian, and yet, they are emphatically original in the realization of their own causa finalis. With elegance which obliterates the difference between dream and reality, these marvelous female portraits and figures emerge from marble and bronze with Alexandrian sophistication, combined with Arethusian provocation. The marble is changed so much that it resembles a lump of thick fat which, before our eyes, starts melting in a pan. The consciously chosen concept does not by means depart from self-control and modesty, as is the case even when depicting a flower or a bar of soap. And yet, the mouths of these sculptures do not merely kiss, but simply swallow the moment when they were turned to stone and dramatically share it with the beholder. Although they cannot touch us, these sculptures arouse in us an extremely intense, ancient erotic situation, which is realized through the most sensual, tender, but still, the least erotically imbued female protagonists that one can ever imagine.
Tome Serafimovski has all the features of a great, magnetic artistic personality – Persona Gratissima. He is unquestionably original, he is a part of his time, of his environment, of his cultural tradition, and of his mythological abode. At the same time, he potently breaks the barriers of his own tradition and mentality, where his identity resides, destroying the impositions placed on art so that it become an ideological instrument or a didactic tool. However, the sculptures dedicated to key institutions and personalities which form and bear witness to Macedonian historical identity (such as the series of presentations starting from “Pejo the Shrewd” to “Mother Theresa,” via “Theophilact of Ohrid,” “The Miladinov Brothers,” “Father Theodosius Sinaitski,” “Kiril Pejčinović,” “St. Clement of Ohrid,” “St. Cyril and St. Methodius”), show that Tome Serafimovski creates in a radically original manner. These monumental figures of the Macedonian historical consciousness are suggestively rendered without any idealization, and with a visible intention to record the ambivalence and the enigma which, accumulated through the centuries, today may block the instinctive reactions and close the traditional social and psychological ways leading to their reception and effective social influence.
#6 The historians of art and the aestheticians, in time to come, will certainly be put to tremendous hardship if they are to define Tome Serafimovski’s art. On one hand, his mature opus does not discredit the stylistic framework in which the young Serafimovski searches for inspiration and shapes himself as an artist; on the other hand, it is hardly possible to show through argument, consistently and plausibly, that the very same opus, in all its eruptive originality, could grow out of anything else, but from himself.
With no less difficulty will Tome Serafimovski’s work greet the followers of the traditional psychological and sociological interpretations of art. Firmly linked in a chain of elements that belong to the social context, to the genetic code and the psychological constitution of his own homeland, Tome Serafimovski’s culture persuasively and with incomprehensible ease negates their social and psychological determinants, as if they are barriers that determine the artist’s utmost horizon. The fact that Macedonia is not a center of arts in Europe is beyond question. However, some of its artists, Tome Serafimovski the most preeminent among them, a distinction forcefully evident in his works, belong to a center of art that might not be necessarily European. The great narrator, the sculptor Tome Serafimovski, in his works, touches upon the nerve-endings and synapses so that they create a supremely subtle system of radical invigoration. The heartbeats and sinews of people, regardless of where they are, always react to the same provocations in eternally unchanging ways. On the other hand, maximum caution is also justified when further analysis of his relation when one makes comparisons with his own time and country and, even more so, with the visions, dreams and ideals that, though they might be publicly denounced, have never ceased acting upon the chthonic depths of the national soul. In that context, Tome Serafimovski is a classical and utmost example of an intertextual artist. But he does not borrow, does not plagiarize – he replicates, he explicates, he affirms what is revealed to him, and what have been, as his presentations show, facts of the epoch. His works are as much semiotic, narratological structures to communicate to the outside as they are a single autoteleological confession.
#10 Wise and passionate, alluring and honey-sweet, oriented toward aletheia, and to sophrosine, the sculptures of Tome Serafimovski, give meaning to the middle and the end of this century in Macedonia, artistically assimilating all the questions that the world has posed it in this period, and, give the world, in an artistically sublime way, Macedonia’s answer. An integral part of the artistic nervous system and of the mental structure of Macedonia, Tome Serafimovski is more than its representative or interpreter, telling his attractive and magical story, and he, more than anything, has delivered its message.
#5 In his monographic study Passive Tranquility (American Philosophical Society, 1977), dedicated to the sculpture of Fillippo Della Valle, the author Vernon Hyde Minor concludes that every great artist must possess some essential quality that defines his creative identity. As for this post-renaissance sculptor, Minor concludes that the quality that he possesses is that of “passive tranquility.” The key element of Tome Serafimovski’s art is neither passivity nor tranquility. True, it does possess something angelic (the seraphim are angels, and serafimovski means, in Macedonian angelic), but the Tome Serafimovski’s angel, the sculptor, is fiercely active and contemplatively agitated.
His guardian angel must be such, because he bears a heavy burden to lead his protegee, the sculptor, through realms of the most powerful passion a human soul can feel. If Hercules once had to stop at the crossroads and choose between light and dark, each of
Tome Serafimovski’s sculptures has been created as an artistically transposed consequence of dramatically personal decisions concerning the heavenly and earthly (why not even subterranean!) kingdoms. Thanks to the strength of his angel, he manages, with no visible effort, always to solve this radical dilemma in favor of the regions of light. The strength of his guardian angel is so great that it more often appears positive than negative, nomen est omen, showing that the sculptor himself is transformed into a kind of angel – an AGITATED ANGEL! Serafimovski is really angelically powerful and magnetic in his following of higher creative, living and artistic impulses. If contradictory but still harmonious human nature, especially in its highest achievements, can be adequately defined as such, then perhaps such a definition moves within the range within which the principles of the angelic and the agitated can be united.
His cycle THE AGITATED, then, is undoubtedly an artistic confession, a personal legitimization, and a creative manifesto, but at the same time a hymn of the national and human endeavor to rise and remain risen, a hymn sung and epitomized through sculpture, according to its dramatic and expressive density, according to its exciting energetic radiation, and, more than all else, according to the sovereign manner of the subtly presented identity. This cycle is a culmination of the opus that even now marks an epoch in the long history of our sculpture.

Skopje, 18 June, 1998

2018-08-21T17:23:55+00:00 March 1st, 2000|Categories: Essays, Literature, Blesok no. 13|0 Comments