The hand in an unsurpassable tenderness
awakes the fabulous force of the matter…
#10 The second important circumstance in the development of Academician Serafimovski as a sculptor is his return to his native hearth, amidst the tradition of his own Macedonian people. Namely: this tradition neither was – nor could have been – unaffected by the great spiritual movements of antiquity, of the Byzantine-Roman cultural circle, and of Christianization in which the Macedonian people accomplished a civilizational mission in Europe, particularly among the Slavs. Both when it reached its peak and when its strength was weakened, Macedonia was at the center of the spiritual radiance of the most significant philosophies and doctrines that developed in Asia Minor and the Mediterranean. Thus Tome Serafimovski returned to his native hearth, in an environment of Byzantinely-strict, Slavically-dignified, reconcilable and melancholic people; pilgrims who do not speak much, but who, keeping silent, seem to be performing some mute rituals. Academician Cvetan Grozdanov, an erudite and a competent connoisseur and interpreter of these circumstances, maintained that Tome Serafimovski appeared and created in an environment which had resisted free-standing sculpture for centuries, that sculpture in sacral art was treated as a function of architecture and the applied arts, and further that: “ the lack of tradition in the treatment of free-standing, independent sculpture determines this artist’s significant place and mission both within and without the Macedonian creative space… In his commitment to the classical streams of European sculpture, without a marked tradition in his native country in the former period, Serafimovski could have pursued his own vocation and instinct for survival only under the severe vertical of the mountains Sar and Korab, their peaks touching the sky, or in the discomfort of the valley that leads to St. Jovan Bigorski Monastery. To these can only be added the clear, strict contours of the Mijak region costumes that find their way to a classical epic simplicity.”
#4 The return of the young sculptor to his native hearth signified a return to a mythical and heroic space, amidst a tradition of sacral symbols, in an environment upon which a seal of hopelessness and fear had been affixed. However, this return also denoted a different contact with the real space of his people and its epic traditions, a people whose historical memory could not be extinguished despite all the pogroms. He returned to an environment of old men, as if taken from biblical lands, sitting around the hearth and staring into the fire; it was precisely from that fire that they learned the entire metaphysics of the Macedonian spirit. Nevertheless, Serafimovski simultaneously returned to a landscape of dazzling summers and wholesome fruits. He returned to the place where all around him radiated a Mediterranean lyricism and sentiment.
The skeleton in the studio of the young sculptor was already prepared. The heap of clay stood beside him, the same matter out of which God created man. That man waited for his re-creation. Everything now depended on the artist’s thought and his heart embodied in his hands’ gift.
For three hundred centuries, from the Stone Age onward, the sculptor’s one and only starting-point was and remained the primal shape. For the sculptor, as a creator, it does not suffice only to hear and to see. It is inevitable that he should touch the matter, discover its invisible movements, feel its impulses that will lead him to the form and the energy. His hand is his eye, his ear and his word. His hand is his entire spirit: his gray bird – the dove, flying across the darkness surrounding the matter by means of which the latent form comes to light. The strength to re-create the imagination in the form of a consciousness by means of which one enters into space inhabits the palm of his hand.#5 His hand is his brain, his entire nervous system with its synapses. By means of his hand he sees, hears, touches, feels and thinks; with his hand he solves the psychograph of the shape yet to be born amidst the shapelessness and the chaos around him. With it he will transmit all the secrets of the him or her imprisoned in the clay. All the memory of what is being modeled will be transferred to the clay. It will comprehend the secrets of this memory, it will acquire the ability to think and preach, to cross itself and pray, to suffer and sing…
In the moments when he applies the clay the sculptor is absent: he is replaced by his hand, his palm, that in the unpredictable tactile operations with the clay both feels and thinks instead of him. The fear of space that is born in each sculptor when he confronts the clay, is inhabited by the consciousness of the people. From this consciousness the asceticism in the facial expression of the character is also engendered, his sentimental radiance, the layered harmony, the rounded lyrical lines, ceremonies and life rhythms too. The sculptor’s hand – a creator of unreachable cosmic-poetical visions…
On this subject Bachelard said: “the hand, in an unsurpassable tenderness awakes the fabulous force of the matter. All the dynamic dreams, from the most fierce to the most shrewd ones; from the metallic grooves to the least perceptible scratches, live in the human hand, the synthesis of power and skill.”
In these proud and dignified epic poets
we recognize an authentic aspect
of our historical memory…
#3 In his initial phase (1957-65) Serafimovski was preoccupied with folklore and intimate motifs: A Stone Shepherd-boy Playing the Flute, A Sar Mountain Motif, Zurla players, Breakout… these are the motifs whereby his childhood and the spirited, idyllic rhythms of nature under the Sar Mountains call out. Semantically simple expressions of an innocent, sacral world; a sublime drive towards the lyrical polyphony of his homeland. An endeavor to prolong the line of childhood and youth, with reduced elegiac ornaments as expressions of nostalgia for the past. There is here also an unavoidable heroic component (Breakout), which in the memory of the child is identified with the still-present apocalyptic fear of certain events from the National Liberation War in Macedonia.
However, the thing that quickly distinguished Tome Serafimovski as an authentic and a supreme interpreter of the Macedonian historic and epic paradigm is his cycle dedicated to the writers of the Macedonian renaissance, created over a longer period of time. Even if the works previously accomplished were his first attempt to capture the lyrical impulses of the child in him in a solid material, with the thematic cycle devoted to the writers of the Macedonian renaissance Serafimovski quickly and effectively completed a cycle of exceptional importance whereby he made possible a direct dialogue with the Macedonian past and the Macedonian spiritual and moral vocation.
#2 The dialogue Serafimovski conducted with the leaders of the Macedonian cultural renaissance is neither pathetic, commonplace nor imaginary. It is a speech through silence between the creator and our tragedians, wise ascetics, romantics and dignified figures, whose work was accomplished “in a deaf time”. It is the expression of a superior sculptural statement which, by means of epic outpourings, created a thematic cycle through which breathes our entire spiritual heroism.
In the creation of the portraits in this cycle, Tome Serafimovski was confronted with a great temptation: for the majority of the figures portrayed, he had available only their work, biographies and some scanty data and records of them. The physiognomy and the psychology of the renaissance writers portrayed are the product, in fact, of Serafimovski’s creative imagination. We have accepted them as he has presented them to us, those proud, dignified, deeply despairing epic personalities of our history, both with an open heart and a great talent. Thus in this cycle we recognize the authentic voice of our history and our historical memory. In fact, what is in question here is a brilliant idea and an aesthetic achievement: from now on, each of these figures, apart from his literary and historical existence, will have an artistic parallel as well.
#6 In the accomplishment of this cycle Tome Serafimovski chose an antinomic approach to history: neither the absoluteness of the autonomous immanence of art regardless of historical facts, nor yet naked historicism.
A sculptural alphabet that unfolds layer by layer,
in the dreams of the characters…
Parallel with his renaissance cycle, aiming to obtain an insight into his people’s spiritual continuity, Tome Serafimovski created a cycle of portraits of our contemporaries, well-known and easily-recognizable figures of creative artists, both respected and close friends of the sculptor. As opposed to the renaissance cycle, Serafimovski here has had active contact with each of them and this enabled him to draw out the most discreet and the most specific features of their physiognomical and spiritual individuality.
The cycle of contemporaries has been accomplished in a lively and spontaneous artistic language. It is a classical sculptural alphabet whereby Tome Serafimovski unfolds them layer by layer both in terms of the characters’ psychology and dreams. He discards formal physiognomical copying, reduces certain sections and replaces them with smooth surfaces so as to provide a different flow of light through and over them to bring us closer to the world of lively associations, related to the psychological individuality of each one of them. In other words, Serafimovski has skillfully discovered and designated the psychological features of the characters he has created, maximally reducing any pathos in the way he expresses them. These are intensely radiant characters, intellectually richly designed and lyrically defined. In the cycle of contemporaries as well, it can be perceived how hard it is to separate plastic art from both tradition and contemporaneity.
Tome Serafimovski, with an extraordinary invention, also noted that mythology and surrealism are absolute components of the creative act, so that Marko Cepenko could not enter his studio without Siljan of Dolno Konjari, Blaze Koneski without his Sick Hero and Slavko Janevski without Pejo the Shrewd. Thus, with a remarkable lucidity, through rich associations, which in this case have the echoes of iconographic detail, Tome Serafimovski built upon the figures so as to form a new cycle of mythologemes and legends.
An imaginary rider
of earthly and heavenly horses…
#8 Irrespective of the poeticizing and the lyrical and melancholic expression whereby he implanted our historical memory in the durability of the sculptor’s mass, Tome Serafimovski was not satisfied only by aestheticizing the Macedonian historical and spiritual space but, setting out from his essential aesthetic principle – man as the leading theme in his creative work – in one of his phases, he committed himself to shaping more miniature lyrical forms, in which his lyrical feeling and Mediterranean sensibility found full expression.
#9 These forms are spiritualized modulations of the female body, radiating virginity and tenderness. These are not over-emphasized erotic forms, but small-scale poetic myths of woman which resound with sincerity and warmth. These are subtle musical etudes which radiate the elegiac intonation of the sensual and the somewhat forgotten semantics of virginity and the uncommitted sin. This is a striking poetic metaphor for the beauty of the female body which is in contrast to the sublimated symbol of an invisible imaginary rider of earthly and heavenly horses, under whose hooves glitter sparks, as a proof of his virility and strength.
We have been strolling through a creative opus of resounding metaphors indited in stone and bronze.