Bruno Walpoth (italy)
Rabbi Akiva says: “Silence is a fence to wisdom”. A sentence which captures the essence of Bruno Walpoth’s work.
There is peace in the silence of Walpoth's creations; a surreal dimension inhabited by the creations he gives shape - indeed life - imitations of his models whom he mirrors from life.
Hailing from a family of wood sculptors, Bruno Walpoth simultaneously honors a centuries-old tradition and modernizes it for the 21st century. Walpoth carves life-sized human figures from blocks of wood, and finishes the sculptures with acrylic paint. He repeatedly covers and sands down the surfaces to mask evidence of the wood grain and achieve a translucent, skin-like appearance. Walpoth occasionally coats his sculptures with lead and has produced bronze works and drawn portraits, but he continuously finds himself drawn to wood due to its natural sensuality. Drawing inspiration from late Gothic and early Renaissance Italian wood sculpture, Walpoth emphasizes human sensibility over form. He chooses to capture a single moment rather than tell an entire story through each work.
Walpoth uses candid and resistant lime wood or lead leaf foils which he lays out on the wood and hammers as in an embossed work, like in “Walking alone”. Here it’s as if for a very brief moment flesh has turned into metal, a deaf and bleak metal that devours all thoughts and releases the weight of solitude and introspection; the skinny and bony face is moulded on the hollow spaces where the sculptor reveals himself. And when the eyes send deep desolate gleams or when they express astonishment and amazement, or, furthermore, when they are closed, it’s always the silent torment of doubt that we grasp from the artist’s soul.
There is peace in the silence of Walpoth's creations; a surreal dimension inhabited by the creations he gives shape - indeed life - imitations of his models whom he mirrors from life.
Hailing from a family of wood sculptors, Bruno Walpoth simultaneously honors a centuries-old tradition and modernizes it for the 21st century. Walpoth carves life-sized human figures from blocks of wood, and finishes the sculptures with acrylic paint. He repeatedly covers and sands down the surfaces to mask evidence of the wood grain and achieve a translucent, skin-like appearance. Walpoth occasionally coats his sculptures with lead and has produced bronze works and drawn portraits, but he continuously finds himself drawn to wood due to its natural sensuality. Drawing inspiration from late Gothic and early Renaissance Italian wood sculpture, Walpoth emphasizes human sensibility over form. He chooses to capture a single moment rather than tell an entire story through each work.
Walpoth uses candid and resistant lime wood or lead leaf foils which he lays out on the wood and hammers as in an embossed work, like in “Walking alone”. Here it’s as if for a very brief moment flesh has turned into metal, a deaf and bleak metal that devours all thoughts and releases the weight of solitude and introspection; the skinny and bony face is moulded on the hollow spaces where the sculptor reveals himself. And when the eyes send deep desolate gleams or when they express astonishment and amazement, or, furthermore, when they are closed, it’s always the silent torment of doubt that we grasp from the artist’s soul.
