CRITIQUES
Essay on Matthias Alfen Sculptures
BY JUDY KIM, DIRECTOR, AFFILIATES AND ABU DHABI PROJECT OPERATIONS AT THE GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM
“A mathematician confided
That a Möbius band is one-sided,
And you’ll get quite a laugh,
If you cut one in half,
For it stays in one piece when divided”
– A limerick by unknown author
The first time I laid eyes on Matthias Alfen’s sculpture Falling Man (2004) as a part of the jurying process for Housatonic Museum of Art’s first open juried show in spring 2005 it made an immediate and visceral imprint in my mind. The jurying process at HMA was no different than other exhibitions I had juried. Applicants had submitted slides or electronic images of their work. I looked at all of the submissions twice—first very quickly to get a general sense of the submitted works, then again much more slowly looking at and considering each submission carefully. Even at a cursory glance, however, Alfen’s submissions—Dancer (2005) and Falling Man— possessed undeniable gravity and weightiness that pulled me in. Falling Man is a sculpture of a nude male that is anything but classical in the formal sense of the word. Two back-to-back anterior sides of a man comprise this figure. Both halves of his body—the front, and, the front—are formed of concave and convex curves. The curves that form the body tussle and meld together with the tight and taut musculature of the abdomen and limbs suggesting a resistant and heavy fall or drop. The figure itself is bent, and could be read as being concave or convex (forward or backwards). Or, it could be interpreted as being both concave and convex.
How do we decipher this enigmatic work that is both so simple and still such a puzzle? Formally it embodies and expresses duality and oneness; it is literally a figure that is divided yet one. The title and the physical pose of the work seem to suggest a man caught in a balletic stumble—seemingly in a futile yet instinctive attempt to break a fall, a fall that was perhaps not inevitable but impossible to stop once set in motion. And what of the curves? Do they signify the inner contradictions, conflicts, or struggles within oneself? Or, are they simply a convention created by Alfen to convey and accentuate the movement of a rotating body as it falls through the air? As with all great works of art, Falling Man succeeds in deeply engaging a viewer and evoking more questions than answers.
I do not have any definitive answers to my questions. However, since awarding Alfen for Falling Man in HMA’s open juried show, I have had the fortune to view his other sculptures. The formal aspects of Falling Man and its core characteristics are consistent throughout his other figural sculptures—duality and oneness, and an uncertain tension both within the figure and between the figure and its surrounding. I hope that seeing and engaging with the works in this exhibition will offer us the opportunity to further ponder the questions Alfen poses through his art.
Split Sculptural Identity: Matthias Alfen’s Abstractions and Figures
By Donald Kuspit, Art critic, poet, and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Art History and Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
Matthias Alfen began his career, in the late eighties, making rather insular, solid, ruthlessly geometrical sculptures, usually based on the cube. If they were not so concentrated and self-contained, whatever the indentations of negative space that balance their projecting planes – both curved and straight, sometimes juxtaposed to heighten the tension - and thus implicitly as well as explicitly monumental and massive, giving them a certain inner power, they could be read as strictly formal constructions. It is hard to think of Komposition I, 1987 and Kubus, 1988 -- the former deceptively simple in its geometry, the latter more complex (a duality continued in the early nineties abstractions) -- in any other terms. Grosse Stele, 1989, of concrete, and Grosses Kreisornament, 1990, of resin -- the dense, inert, heavy material makes the geometrical masses that compose them all the more emphatic - add cultural meaning to the geometry, but the meaning seems incidental compared to the vigorous geometry it conceptually adorns. Alfen’s sculptures have an aura of permanence, stability, and universality independent of the cultural meaning conferred on them by their titles. Since human beings first philosophized about them, geometrical forms have been recognized as eternal objects, to use Whitehead’s term. Geometrical intelligibility is transcendental, universal, and unchanging; the memorial and sacramental functions of geometry -- Alfen’s stele and cross -- confirms its innate sacredness, and are credible only because of that sacredness.
But unexpectedly, in the New Millenium--as though making a break with his own past as well as the modernist past of geometrical abstraction (regarded by Alfred Barr, along with gestural abstraction, as the grand climax of modernist achievement)--Alfen began making very human figures. Some are female, some are male; some are standing, some are walking; some are falling; some are Janus-headed or Janus-bodied, that is, divided against themselves. Some are fragmented, as in The Unmaking of a Goddess, most are whole, like the Madonna figure, and one has disintegrated, leaving only a burnt out residue and shell of itself, as in Standing Void. The figure in Hic Rhodus, hic saltus is clearly heroic and derived from classical models of masculinity. It alludes to the Colossus of Rhodes, a gigantic statue that stood at the head of the harbor of that island in antiquity. A symbol of titanic power, it was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. It collapsed during an earthquake, perhaps as a warning from fate not to challenge the gods. Alfen now uses softer materials--clay, plaster, polymer, wood—although a few sculptures are in bronze, like several of the geometrical sculptures. Virtually all of the figures are naked, and however twisted and self-contradictor--the Hic Rhodus figure is exemplary--remain full-bodied and whole. They are clearly less stable and balanced than the geometrical sculptures.
Clearly there has been a major change in attitude, sensibility, form and expressivity--a basic change in heart and style. Alfen’s turn away from abstraction to figuration--whatever residues of modernist abstraction are incorporated in the figure, for example, the cavity that serves as the right breast of Standing Woman (an inversion or denaturalization of female form evident in many Cubist sculptures, e.g., Archipenko’s dancers)--signals a turn from art for art’s sake to art for life’s sake. Goethe’s Faust said that two hearts beat in his chest, acknowledging his split personality. Two languages beat in Alfen’s art; until recently the language of the human figure was repressed by the language of geometrical abstraction. Alfen seems to integrate them, as the interplay of concavity and convexity in his new figures (male as well as female) suggests. But the body subsumes the geometry that informs it. The body is not reduced to geometry; instead, Alfen uses inorganic geometry to convey the complex dynamics of its organic space. In short, the negative and positive spaces--the “ins and outs”--of the geometrical sculptures have been transposed to the figurative sculptures, but they now have visceral rather than only formal significance. They suggest the mysteriousness of the lived body. Turning the body inside out, as it were, Alfen turns the body into a kind of Mobius strip. Inner space and out form flow into one another, almost becoming indistinguishable and interchangeable. Alfen’s figures involve the same paradoxical coordination of inner and outer as his cubes, but in a more perplexing, intense way.
I can’t claim to know exactly why Alfen made the change--why he broke sharply with his past. It is a revolution in form--certainly a repudiation of modernism. Perhaps Alfen realized that geometrical abstraction had become clichéd after a century of use, although he showed that it could still generate intriguing effect. By art historical default, as it were, the figure, and with its representation, became freshly important. But Alfen’s sudden change of sculptural direction--a change from abstraction to empathy?, the play on Wilhelm Worringer’s famous distinction--can’t be as deliberate as it looks. Such a basic change in artistic consciousness signals an existential crisis. Alfen’s New Figure, whatever its allegorical import, is above all about the body--a clearly disturbed body, as the twists and turns that distort it indicate. If the body is the first ego, as Freud said, then it is the site where the problems of existence--and ultimately a sense of its problematic character--first make themselves felt. They are expressed through the body because without the body there is no existence. The ruthless split in Alfen’s bodies and heads, indicating a self divided against himself--a self that is a precarious structure of opposites, and thus perpetually on the verge of coming apart--suggests the inherently traumatic character of human existence. The split implies that the threat of disintegration is innate. But without inner integrity or wholeness, the outside world is also threatening, which is perhaps why many of Alfen’s male figures face it with clenched fists and tensed muscles. They are ready to do battle with it because there is nothing they can do about the conflict built into them.
I think the crisis in Alfen’s art suggested by his rejection of abstraction and affirmation of representation was also a crisis of self-confidence. It involved the realization that geometry inhibited his creativity and expressivity, however creatively and expressively he used it. Alfen’s figurative sculptures have more creative nerve--are more creatively daring--than his geometrical abstractions. The body offers a more difficult kind of creative challenge than simple geometry: it is more physically and expressively complex, and has immediate human import. Figurative sculpture invariably engages us because it makes us conscious of our own bodies, which we tend to take for granted as long as they are healthy. Perhaps the germ of the change from geometrical idols to psychological figuration appears in Alfen’s 1993 Schriftpsychogramm drawings. An intense abstract handwriting, loosely hieroglyphic it is clearly meant to have psychological import, however obscure. But the truly psychological had to wait a decade to come into its own in Alfen’s work.
The geometrical sculptures are self-identical, however much they are constructed of unidentical spaces, but the figurative sculptures have no clear formal identity, implying that human identity is always a question. Allegorizing “doubleness”, Alfen suggests that human beings can never be held to one identity. They are in perpetual identity crisis. Alfen’s Falling Man suggests its consequences. The Fall of Man is a Biblical them, and existential philosophers remind us that we are constantly falling towards death. Alfen’s figures usually stand upright, but they are destabilized into doubleness, implying they are ripe for a fall. Standing Void shows that out bodies will rot to nothing, however upright we stand. The ironic-tragic implications of Alfen’s Janus figures and heads are lacking in his geometrical abstractions, however monumental both are.
Tragic irony is explicit in Alfen’s Fossilmenschen series, 2002-2003, his most expressively daring works to date. Alfen seems to be suggesting that human beings will become extinct, victims of their own uncontrollable violence and brutality, signaled by the display of teeth in several mouths, opened wide as if in a scream but also, ambiguously, in anger and rage. Will we bit each other into oblivion? Is Alfen saying that they, we will survive only as archeological finds displayed in the natural history and/or art museums--what greater art than that created by nature?--of post-human beings? The figures embedded--sedimented--in Alfen’s rusting walls suggest as much. Violence is explicit in Untitled #19. It looks like a scene out of hell. Has the bleeding central male figure had his heart ripped from his chest in some sacrificial ritual? Several of the figures seem to be self-portraits, as though Alfen--the artist--is the exemplary victim.
Many of the Fossilmenschen are nightmarish and grotesque, especially the surreal stoneware heads. They are masterpieces of agony and doubleness, all the more ironic because it proliferates seemingly ad infinitum. Alfen has outdone himself, both expressively and formally. They are his most complicated constructions. Subtle color adds to their resonance. In the current exhibition, heads float in a charcoal river, confirming their morbid meaning: the river is black with the death—and perhaps also forgetfulness, to refer to Lether, the mythological river the dead crossed in antiquity--in which humanity is drowning (There is a classical, heroic aspect to many of Alfen’s heads, confirmed by their epic look; many are in effect archaeological fragments). The Guardian Head that watches over the twentieth century--many historians have said it is the most barbaric, brutal of any century--are epitomized by the black charcoal. It is a powerful symbol of death and despair: one has only to light the charcoal to start a conflagration--a holocaust.
I want to conclude by focusing on two stoneware heads, one female, the other male, both made in 2003. Doubleness has become morbid and dangerous: the double has become a tumor growing out of the side of the head, multiplying with cancerous rapidity. Doubleness has become a monstrous sickness unto death, a mutant growth that parasitically preys on the head it emerges from. Alfen’s pathological heads, presented without pedestals--their absence gives the heads greater presence and immediacy--gives expressionistic power to Alfen’s isolated figures. They take the isolation of Alfen’s Madonna figures--one has her head bent downwards in despair, the other is bent upwards as if wishing for a redemptive sign--a decisive mad step further. The dividedness of Alfen’s two Madonnas conveys terrible suffering, and the desperate need for faith, but the heads suggest inescapable demonic possession by a violent altar ego, and the horror of being without faith, which reconciles one with God, who has allowed so much suffering, and with oneself, who has helplessly suffered. Unable to heal the split in their personality--it literally tears Alfen’s figures apart, showing that they are destroyed body and soul--Alfen’s figures suggest the inevitability of insanity in a violent world. His heads protest it even as they embody it. They are a major contribution to--a brilliant extension of--the “art of the scream”, as German Expressionism was called when it emerged at the troubled beginning of the twentieth century. Alfen’s doomed heads indicate that there is still a deep need for it in the twenty-first century.
Matthias Alfen Disturbed Surfaces: Mirroring Depths
By Patrick McCord, Ph. D, Writer
"We must live in the present, but the present is always pinched between two potent mental constructs: the past and the future. Our memories are our reference to the past and our imaginations are how we conjure the future. Memory and imagination: both essentially inaccurate, both illusions concocted by what we want to believe. Both distractions from breathing in the moment." Ibrahim Sarfraz
Overview:
Matthias Alfen’s work often plays with the human understanding of time as space. The time of our life—is like the space of a path, each moment a step... the entire life: a journey. We use many of the same words to show position as both spacial and temporal. In the time/space of our imaginations, the past is behind us; it is filled with memories; the present is a good spot to be in, and arena for choices, a vantage point to look back and foreward; the future waits in front of us, a positive potential, an expanse of possibility. And yet, time is not like concrete space. While you may know a space, like your house or a soccer field, because you can move confidently through it, the only evidence we have of either past events or future potentials, are constructs in the now, our active perception of the present. Time is not space but imagination. And anything—like a sculpture or a painting—in our present experience that seems strange, distorted, unusual, or arresting is telling us something about our memories, our preconceptions, and our expectations.
Sculpture:
Matthias Alfen mixes his deep understanding of human anatomy and kinesiology with a surrealist’s taste for contradiction and overstatement in witty figures designed to both confuse and compel. Alfen’s surrealism, like Giacometti’s, is based in the human shape, but Alfen manipulates scale and form to create shapes in space of disconcerting, sometimes primitive, power. All Alfen’s nude figures are, to some degree, accurate depictions of the human form, yet he likes to exaggerate volumes: they are too wide, too long, or sometimes he uses a gigantic scale—but as he exaggerates with proportion, Alfen then subtracts from a complete or consistent body image. Some of his work focuses only on a single body part or area, cutting away the rest of the form. The single hand or head or even a pair of feet, in clear lines but expanded scale, tease the viewer to imagine the rest of the missing body: a huge person, not quite of the real world, but a lyric and sensitive whole being.
Sometimes Alfen, in the manner of the Cubists, incorporates an impossible dimension into the shape. One figure has a face and from that angle, the form suggests a whole body, yet as the viewer moves to a different angle, she discovers that what appeared to be the back or the side the figure’s head, is a different face, another mood or moment, hidden behind the pose of first impression; we are looking at two moments in the same person. What emotion is it that connects them? Sometimes Alfen perfectly inverts a body part so what should be a convex bulge of muscle is a concavity in the exact shape of that same muscle—the negative a perfect rendition of the expected positive; other times, he will build an articulated figure in action around an emptiness; instead of solid center core, absence. A walking figure observed from the front is missing toes, but seen from the side has the toes on the back of the foot, as if walking simultaneously both forward and backward, and this then forces us to think about the other absent presences suggested by the curves of the form.
It is in these formal additions and subtractions, in the puzzle of absent presences, that the eye is lured to look more closely. And with the eye, comes the viewer’s own proprioception and imagination. When looking at a human form, whether at a whole body or a part, the viewer’s own physique is sympathetically stimulated—we feel bodily images in our own bodies as well as seeing them “over there.” The more we look, the more intensely we feel the proprioception of our own bodies. Alfen’s exaggerations overload our inner imaginary selves, while his subtractions and inversions deny the requisite solidity that we take for granted: viewing his work creates a minor crisis of seeing and self. Like Giacometti or Francis Bacon, Alfen’s ability to extrude, isolate or distort the human form in a dream-like way both puzzles and arrests us; his forms create a hallucinatory reference, a strangely exciting perturbation of what our own presence (or absence) might mean.
Shining Surfaces/Glowing Depths
The young Picasso never wasted a canvas. If he couldn’t sell a painting, he painted another on top of it. Sometimes he would even incorporate a few of the submerged lines from the first painting into his current creation. Like Picasso, Matthias Alfen has painted the Shining Surfaces/Glowing Depths series atop earlier canvases, but going beyond the young Spaniard’s pragmatic economies, Alfen is attempting a meditation on the nature of what is past and how the past creates the past and even implies the future. According to Alfen, the painted canvas can be “the membrane between past and future. The canvas holds an image—an active perceptual present-tense for both painter and viewer—through which the past flows toward the future; it is an emphatic experience of now.”
When he conceived of this series of canvases, Matthias Alfen knew he wanted to work in a metallic colors, polished and tarnished silvers, platinum, iron, steel, and the occasional glow of gold beneath the surface. These are the colors and patina of 21st Century industrialization, urbanization, and the human presence of shiny machines and buildings... But Alfen began by taking his own canvases from a period when he was working with lushly colored abstract-impressionist landscapes, and like the frugal Picasso, Alfen began painting on top of them from the contrasting metallic pallette. Going beyond Picasso’s minor echoing of his old works, Alfen studied the originals for their structural lines and organization, using those details as the basis for each new canvas’s flowing abstractions. While the dominant metal colors make for a modern, even machine-like surface, the variety, flow, and the interlocking nature of his shapes gives the designs a subtle organic feel. The Gestalt, or whole impression of each one is an intricate interweave of energetic forces, suggesting mazes, sometimes maps or jigsaw puzzles, or perhaps the intertwining of an underground root system. Also unlike Picasso, Alfen doesn’t simply allude to his earlier original, he allows actual sections of that colorful past work to show through unpainted “windows” in the silvery surface. A more Romantic past shows through, but only glimpsed as it must be integrated in a fresh design conception.
Yet, when he began silvering over the first few colored canvases, Alfen felt some confliction: on the one hand, he was vandalizing his previous work, not unlike the haters who spray paint or slash Old Masters. Every painted canvas he was defacing could be potentially valuable at some future point as an authentic artifact of a past theme. Today, Picasso’s paint-overs are X-rayed so that the lost genius of the earlier canvas can be recovered. But Alfen was impatient with this kind of thinking which sentimentalizes memory and makes a fetish of “potential” value. So he decided to “vandalize” his own work in still another way, by slashing holes. But instead of slashes that would destroy the surface integrity of the canvas, Alfen saw an opportunity to give the work an added dimension. Cutting actual holes in the canvas in similar shapes to the “windows to the past” he had already left unpainted, he then backed these new openings like actual windows, using either transparent Lucite or a mirror surface, adding two new dimensions to the work.
The clear windows invite the viewer to look through the painted surface to see what is actually behind it; but in doing so, this window destroys the pretense that the framed painting is an abundant, holistic, and sufficient experience. Looking through to what is behind—the wall, a shadow, perhaps another image planted there as a comment—reminds us that as complete and whole we believe ourselves to be on our own present-tense experience, we must be aware of the unseen dimension of the past “behind” us, supporting our current being
The mirror surfaces offer two more conundrums for the viewer, depending on the angle. Looking from the side, the mirror in the canvas will offer reflections of the area behind the viewer, yet in front of the painting—the room, people, light, the opposite wall or ceiling—as if inviting the viewer to spontaneously incorporate the reflected images into the greater design—it’s what the human mind wants to do, to make wholes out of parts, but it’s a dynamic dimension of potential meaning we don’t associate with a static, “finished” painting.
And then, walking over to look straight on into the mirror, the viewer must see herself in the painting. A witty reminder that each viewer only sees through the lens of her own experience. Although the painting may appear to give the same perceptual potential to everyone, each of us has a unique impression. We are constructing the meaning of the canvass as we construct all meanings, through our personal understanding, the memories and training of our individual perceptions and thoughts.
The Work of Matthias Alfen: A Sculptural Journey from Existentialism to String Theory
By Dr. Howard Anton, Professor of Mathematics, Author, Research Mathematician at Cape Canaveral, FL
On viewing an Alfen sculpture one senses in his juxtaposition of concave and convex forms an antagonistic tension of opposites: time and timelessness, space and void, chaos and order, birth and death. Temporally, one sees and feels a flow of time, but cannot discern logically whether it is a flow from past to future or from future to past. It is as if the viewer is a “Janus”, looking forward and backward simultaneously, able to see a fusion of past and future. Spatially, Alfen leads us through a labyrinth of balanced positive and negative forms that are melted seamlessly into a coherent whole. Much like a relativistic physicist, he weaves time and space into an artistic universe that challenges us to study it and understand it intellectually.
Alfen credits the inspiration for his work to a fortuitous observation of a cicada emerging from its larval shell to begin its new life cycle after 15 years underground. The juxtaposition of the negative form of the hollow shell and the positive form of the emerged insect, together with their life-death symbolism, left an indelible impression on him. For Alfen this natural process has symbolic layers that he reflects in his art: the hollow shell representing the space we occupy and the brief life of the positive-form cicada representing the ephemeral human existence. He notes that this same dichotomy of shapes is evidenced in ancient Egyptian art and culture – the juxtaposition of the negative interior shape of the sarcophagus and the positive exterior shape of the mummified body are, to Alfen’s eye, analogous to the cicada and its empty shell.
Alfen’s work is more than an artistic exercise in temporal and spatial gymnastics – time and space are his tools for probing into deeper matters. One senses, for example, that his temporal-spatial amalgam is a metaphor for other things – perhaps the ephemeral human condition and the struggle to understand the nature of our universe and our being.
Sometimes he conveys that struggle in images of gut-wrenching agony (as in “Falling Man”) and sometimes in tranquil introspection (as in “Standing Female”). One senses that there is also a deeper meaning in Alfen’s antagonistic tension of opposites – perhaps the conflict between intuition and science, between art and mathematics, between matter and antimatter, or between chaos and order.
To fully appreciate the symbolic richness of Alfen’s work one must view it not only in an artistic context, but also in the framework of contemporary mathematics, physics, and philosophy. Philosophers, physicists, and artists share the common goal of describing reality – the philosopher in the medium of words, the physicist in the medium of numbers and equations, and the artist in the medium of image and metaphor.
Although one might argue that physics seeks objective reality while art originates in subjective reality, the difference is artificial since one can make the case that although abstraction transcends the “objective world” it arrives at the same reality, only along a different path. Indeed, artists have often preempted physicists by incorporating into their work descriptions of the physical world that science only later discovers to be valid.
Consider, for example, Alfen’s “Falling Man”. The work shows a man, arms outstretched, falling from one point of view and balancing from another. Artistically, one can consider this to be a temporal extension of cubism in which Alfen, in the spirit of Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase”, has skillfully manipulated time as well as view and perspective.
But surely Alfen intends that we also see the two views “relativistically” as a single event in which the man is simultaneously falling and balancing. This apparent paradox is well known to physicists who have struggled with the concept of simultaneity in their effort to explain how light can exhibit properties of waves and particles simultaneously.
The German physicist, Werner Heisenberg observed: “Light and matter are both single entities, and the apparent duality arises in the limitations of our language.” In “Falling Man” Alfen has managed to capture in sculptor’s language the essence of a phenomenon that, as Heisenberg observed, renders verbal description impotent. Before considering some interpretations of Alfen’s work that fall outside the realm of physics, let me comment further on the mathematical aspect of his positive and negative forms as it relates to contemporary physics.
Euclidean geometry was developed to describe in mathematical language the three-dimensional space that we can see and measure. In the mid 19th century German mathematician Georg Riemann gave a landmark lecture on a geometry of curved space that opened the door for Albert Einstein’s four-dimensional space-time universe and ultimately for the work of today’s physicists on string theory.
The latest formulation of string theory postulates eleven space-time dimensions, seven of which are unobservable in our four-dimensional space-time universe. Thus, physicists, whose stock in trade is careful observation, have been forced to accept the “reality” of a permanently unobservable aspect of our universe. Is this what Alfen’s “Standing Female” is trying to convey? – the positive form looking out on an observable universe unaware of her unobservable counterpart embodied in negative form? An important ingredient of string theory is “supersymmetry”, a yet unproven theory that posits the existence of an equal number of certain particles (fermions and bosons) residing in matched pairs. Should the theory be proved, then that proof will unite the four fundamental forces of nature – electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong and weak nuclear forces – and that will lead to the so-called “Grand Unified Theory”, the Holy Grail that physicists have long sought. Is Alfen’s balance of positive and negative spaces a sort of supersymmetry that is still another example of artistic anticipation of a yet unproved theory of reality?
Of course, what Alfen’s work says is determined by the frame of reference in which we choose to view it, so let us consider a totally different view of the symbolism of his positive and negative spaces. For this purpose we will consider “Falling Man” from the “existential” point of view that was articulated by Jean-Paul Sartre and others.
In his 1940 work, “Being and Nothingness”, Sartre posed the question “What is it like to be a human being?” He then answered his own question by asserting that a human being exists both as an “object” (expressed artistically by Alfen’s positive, convex forms) and as a “consciousness” or “nothingness” (expressed by Alfen’s negative, concave forms). Consciousness, because it is nothingness, allows us to choose what we will be – it is our free will, our ability to define our lives through a series of our own choices. These choices often create opposing outcomes. In “Falling man” Alfen shows two different scenarios. On one side the agonizing figure is falling, on the other side a seemingly calm figure maintains its equilibrium. The destiny of these two processes is again a dichotomy: “Life and Death”, or Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness”.
The Egyptian influence, alluded to earlier, is evidenced in Alfen’s “Standing Female”. This work, though more placid and introspective than “Falling Man”, shares the same philosophical foundation. The face and body are articulated in both positive and negative form. Though sharing a common body, each form neither recognizes nor dominates the other. The positive form with its timeless, monolithic quality of Egyptian statuary, conveys an individual bound by ritual, whereas the dynamic, negative form, because of its nothingness, conveys a free will that is unshackled by that ritual. What is remarkable in this piece is Alfen’s ability to bridge a time gap of 5000 years and find elements of contemporary Post Modern science and philosophy in ancient Egyptian culture.
The Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti once said: “Art and science mean trying to understand. Failure or success plays a secondary role.”
Alfen and others have expressed the same idea another way: “Good art comes about by attempting the impossible and, though doomed to failure, the striving spawns innovation and creativity.” We see that artistic striving in Alfen’s work. He has faced head on some of the most important questions of science, mathematics, philosophy, and contemporary art. The more the viewer allows himself or herself to be immersed in his work the more evident its depth, creativity, innovation, and uniqueness become.