Recherches (Dec 2016)
Brancusi et l’expérience visionnaire
Abstract
In this essay, the author asserts that, in the attraction of certain well-known poets of the twentieth century for Brancusi’s sculptures, what is at work is a similar possible openness of the two artistic vocations towards a “high depth” of our being, a way of living the artistic experience as a threshold for states of enlarged consciousness in front of life and the world. One can consider Brancusi’s works as “good conductors of revelation”: they are objects which, by their formal purity, intercede between the material and the spiritual in our consciousness. Art functions, in this case, as a trigger of a unified, expanded state of our inner world. This inner enlargement can be visual or poetic, can manifest itself in sculptural or poetical forms. What counts is the “aesthetic rapture” so to say, in front of a perfectly realized artwork, since it can function as a prefiguration, or a replacement of a spiritual rapture. And a spiritual rapture is in fact an enlargement of the human consciousness over its supposed limits. Brancusi’s sculptures represent, for all viewers but especially for poets of a visionary type, exceptional opportunities of exaltation, visual gifts of harmonious illumination, chances of revelation which, for an intense prolonged instant, can provide an expansion of our being.
Keywords
