"The cosmopolitan message by Vighen Avetis’s stone at Brancaleone" By Carlo Coppola
BRANCALEONE (RC) – With the solemn closing of the first edition of Mega Galmata, hosted at the Altalia Hotel Villaggio Club, Calabria's Ionian coast has rediscovered itself as a crossroads of ecumenical dialogue among peoples. For several days, sculptors from Armenia, Italy, Iran, Ukraine, Greece, Poland and India transformed Calabrian stone into an open-air workshop of art, making beauty bloom again in a time tragically marked by the clamor of war and geopolitical fractures. The initiative was conceived by Francesco Amodei, himself a central figure and founder of the Institute for Art and Restoration "Palazzo Spinelli" in Florence.
The demiurgic soul of the symposium is the Armenian sculptor Vighen Avetis, an eclectic and rigorous figure whom art historians and his most fervent admirers are wont to describe as "a servant of principles and never of princes." Trained in the great school of the masters of twentieth-century Armenian sculpture – but, even before that, in the discipline of an untamed inner quest – Avetis has always looked to Michelangelo Buonarroti as an ideal summit. He shares with the Renaissance master a visceral love for the city of Florence, which in 2014 awarded him the prestigious Fiorino d'oro as part of the Premio Firenze, as well as a total, unconditional dedication of human existence to the sacred fire of Art.
A free spirit, averse to the conventions of the establishment, Avetis has been over the years a voice out of the chorus: a pioneer of sculpture symposia in Cavriglia (Arezzo) and, even earlier, in the heroic martyr city of Shushi, he has managed to shatter, through the force of shaped matter, the convenient narratives of "Azerbaijani historiography," aimed at claiming the anachronistic statehood origins of the "White Ram." At the same time, with equal ethical intransigence, the artist has never spared harsh invectives against the oligarchic power and the false Armenian magnates, accused of having plundered the public good under the guise of a hypocritical rescue of the Homeland. This vein of cultural and civic militancy also includes his recent closeness to the initiatives of the "My Step" Foundation, led by Anna Hakobyan, through which he has promoted significant cultural bridges between the motherland and Italy, involving distinguished figures of contemporary art criticism such as Prof. Francesco Gallo Mazzeo.
His artistic teaching resounds as a universal admonition: "Art for Art's sake, as the supreme vehicle of evolution for the human being, provided that the latter intends to evolve." If contemporary man, accustomed to materialist pragmatism, struggles to grasp such devotion and dismisses it as pure utopia, history takes it upon itself to prove that it is precisely from visionaries – and heroes – that the great renewals of the spirit arise. Faith, honor, spiritual tension and a vision of the Homeland that is never narrowly chauvinistic, but rather set within the bed of a universalist cosmopolitanism: these are the very ideals that, during the years of the rigid Soviet dictatorship, brought him within a step of deportation to Siberia, and that continue today to guide his chisel and his vision. An emblematic human and aesthetic journey, which the Armenian director Rouben Kochar chose to immortalize two years ago in an intense documentary film.
As a crowning achievement of this fruitful stay on the Reggio coast, the Municipal Administration of Brancaleone has announced its intention to confer honorary citizenship on Vighen Avetis, solemnly sealing a pact of friendship and chosen affinity between the local community and the Maestro. What remains in Brancaleone today are the monumental works carved in stone; above all, what remains is the hope that Mega Galmata, born as a courageous workshop of peace and encounter among cultures, may establish itself as a permanent event in the years to come.
