Critical text

Shaping wood, stone and Carrara marble: a passion that fully inhabits this sculptor. From this intense dialogue with matter emerges a rich and authentic body of work, nourished by the emotion and dreams of Alberto Von Fach. A meeting with him does not leave one indifferent, for one perceives his intimate bond and constant respect for the material, whether hard or fragile, which he must convince, bending it without brutality to his creative desire.

Chilean by origin, Von Fach settled in Paris in 1980, yet he often returns to his country to recover part of his inspiration, to reconnect with his first sensations and also to seek ancestral materials, such as the magnificent alerce tree, thousands of years old.

His taste for creation goes back to childhood. Painting and sculpture attracted him, and he later chose the fascinating struggle with living matter. Thus began a personal path. In Paris, he formed himself artistically and worked in contact with artists and their works.

Patiently, he searched for that uncertain exchange that allows the sculptor to inscribe his reflection. At first he believed matter to be docile, trying to impose his will upon it; but he quickly understood the balance he had to find with it, and therefore his own writing between abstraction and synthetic figuration.

He digs, scratches and alternates smooth and worked surfaces in dynamic rhythms carrying human feeling. Wood, marble and stone become life, flesh, in an absolute sense of existence. Yet they retain their primitive strength, because matter has a history.

At times, he offers them a second birth, as with the burnt alerce tree, brutalized by man. Von Fach recovers it, often from water, works it with love and shapes it into a magnificent work where only the essential is revealed in the complex simplicity and impulse of the form. He leaves in each support something primitive, deliberately free.

He thus offers us, for our meditation, his reflection in sculptures matured over time. Unconcerned with fashion, far from convention, he reveals a deep commitment to bringing forth his secret thought, his inner light. He lives his work within the mystery of creation, taking a unique path through which past and present come together.

When he creates a face, it is through the essence of its features, working the material to bring forth expression without detail, as in the moving « Obsidian Head », where presence and simplicity meet. There are also harmonious curves suggesting bodies and tender couples.

Daphne, Socrates, myths and philosophers inspire him; for him they symbolize life and its path, love between beings and all the questions that never cease to torment the human spirit. Mineral and vegetal presences inhabit this rigorous creation, sometimes gestural yet controlled, evoking tenderness or power, with emotion always underlying it.

A « sculptor of feeling », he bears witness to a profound commitment and transcends silent matter. His creation, animated by an inner fire, comes fully into being.

Nicole Lamothe · Art critic