Criticizes

Mario Chamie Franklin’s scultpyure in unengaged and elegant, a perfect synthesis between the object’s image and its coherent unity. His artistic option goes beyond his work to reflect his own life – man and artist in total harmony. Sculpture in general, and specially Brasilian sculpture, has suffered, over the last two decades, a sort of withdrawal of prestige. This withdrawal did not derive from its occasional lost of significance or artistic updating. Maybe it was due to its own internal changes , after the revolutions of the first half of this century. These changes were not only in the sculptural material, but mainly in the conceptions of mass and volume, form and movement, space and use applied to it. In these terms, we get confused when faced with the abyss which separates the “weight” of Henry Moore from the lightness of Calder, or the lightness of Calder from the temporary bulkyness off Christo, who “packages” buildings, bridges and mountais. In Brasilian terms, we are astonished to see that after the modernist outbreak with Brecheret,Bruno Giogi and others, we have diversified between rationalist abstractions and the return to folkloric, stylized myths, ranging from Franz Weissmann’s metallic cleanliness to Stockinger’s dense, primitive beauty. The apparent withdrawal of the art market of sculpture may have been due to excess of changes and courses. Today, faced with the more or less adverse diversification, what seems to actually count is the artist’s personal contribution, which does not get lost in the maze of search and which, at the same time, knows how to find its way in the clear-sighted simplicity of his solutions. An artist to whom we owe a great deal, for the almost anonymous humbleness of this work and for the original eloquence of its results, is the sculptor Àlvaro Franklin da Silveira. In the outlook of the newest Brasilian sculpture, his contribution – Which neither can nor should continue in obscurity – quietly imposes itself, with the assertiveness of one who knows the language he builds up. Franklin’s language is not divorced from the sensitive word and its artistic, symbolic correspondences. Franklin’s faithfulness to this world leads him to the observation and to the objective mastery of its lines, surfaces and internal relationships. Its greater proof is that, before carrying out a sculpture, Franklin photographs and documents its peer, taken from the natural outside world. After that, he studies the document and the photograph, and analyses the possible analogies of movement and space. Theses analogies will serve as ispiration for the prototype upon which he fashions and produces the sculpture. The work of this surprising artist’is, there fore, formed of objects, of relation ship berween objects, as if they were living beings from a second nature. And one must say it is a rich nature, alive and full of discoveries. Brazilian sculpture has, in Franklin, an artist who, be it through granite, marble, onix or wood, bears witness to its power and the necessary recovery of its prestige.