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Short filmTranscript
00:00:00Much can be made out of scattered fragments.
00:00:29From time to time, discarded rubble can reveal lost histories.
00:00:59For the better part of the 20th century, the artist Gonzalo Fonseca worked in solitude and relative obscurity.
00:01:16Traces of Fonseca remain inscribed in his works, which are spread across the globe, hidden in corners, concealed in memory.
00:01:29There's an obscure term sometimes used in archaeology, disjecta membra.
00:01:38It refers to the method of reassembling a text or an artifact by piecing together its broken shards,
00:01:44trying to assemble a whole by collecting its scattered fragments.
00:01:50It calls back to the Egyptian myth of Osiris,
00:01:53the murdered king whose dismembered body is reassembled by his wife, the goddess Isis.
00:02:00The term endures as a poetic expression of fragments pieced together anew to tell the story of a whole.
00:02:10To understand Gonzalo Fonseca and his artwork, one must collect and attempt to reassemble what remains,
00:02:16beginning with the stones he left behind.
00:02:19So from that, he was a place to have been a while to draw a book.
00:02:22And then, the one must collect and attempt to obtain the stblick on the rest of the place.
00:02:23So, still survives a piece of the building on a stone and a stone in the direction of the stone's death and the stone's death.
00:02:24And that means that you are a perfect commander in the stone's death.
00:02:25And that means that you never need to be a perfect member.
00:02:28That means that the old man was the limit of a created name.
00:02:29So you are a prepared man, so you cannot collect and attempt to collect,
00:02:30and you are a perfect couple of things that are all the differences in the stone's death and that are all the ones that are all about by using the stone's death.
00:02:31So, in this case, the story of a JULy, the world must connect to this man's death and that are all the most vulnerable.
00:03:34History and the ages ran through him.
00:03:40Fonseca climbed the great pyramids.
00:03:43He traced words to their murky roots.
00:03:45He knew ancient histories as though he witnessed them himself.
00:03:49Fonseca was a man of deep learning and insatiable curiosity.
00:03:53He was a conduit to the past, to its myths, its lives, its traces, but particularly to its forms.
00:04:04Gonzalo Fonseca spent his life rendering a playfully atavistic vision into stone.
00:04:13To rediscover Fonseca is to uncover deeper truths and wisdom gathered from the distant past.
00:04:20Reassembling Fonseca is a journey toward understanding the very meaning of stone.
00:04:25Reimagined Fonseca is a journey towards the past.
00:04:31Reimagined Fonseca is an Relaxed Fonseca.
00:04:33Reimagined Fonseca is an
00:09:14Gonzalo was not depending on exhibitions, gallerists and all that theater.
00:09:21He was just not depending and into it.
00:09:22And this was a choice.
00:09:23I saw people coming, I saw people coming, God is giving him a check, writing here, I gave
00:09:27you 50,000 for this and he said, get the fuck out of here.
00:09:31He didn't say this, but you know, that was the message.
00:09:33He said, oh, just go, please go.
00:09:34He could even get angry in that moment.
00:09:37And I was like, you know, it's a statement.
00:09:38And I was like, you know, 20 years old, you look at this and you feel, wow, this is a statement.
00:09:42And again, the person is not rich or something, you know, like he doesn't need it or whatever.
00:09:46It's like, it's a statement.
00:09:47It's something which is like, why?
00:09:49I was standing for something else, and Gonzalo stood for something else for me in so many ways.
00:09:59Gonzalo Fonseca hid in plain sight.
00:10:02Born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1922, he spent the majority of his adult life in New York City.
00:10:07Gonzalo lived through and made art in the swelter of the 20th century.
00:10:13He resided on the same block as Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, yet he was far from that world.
00:10:22One could hardly consider Gonzalo part of any era, any scene or movement.
00:10:28Gonzalo's work directed him toward the deep past and often alienated him from the present.
00:10:33His tricky relationship to time left him in a world of his own device.
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00:11:07Gonzalo's body and mind occupied separate spaces.
00:11:22From his loft, Gonzalo's thoughts may have been caught up in an ancient Latin grammatical
00:11:27riddle, or a 5,000-year-old Egyptian plumbing technique, or a 17th-century architectural
00:11:32quandary.
00:11:33Yet Fonseca's training and practice were rooted in 20th-century modernism.
00:11:38Gonzalo fluently drew from an intimate engagement with history and myth.
00:11:42In conversation, he mixed the many languages he spoke.
00:11:45He held entire museum collections at his fingertips, citing them piece by piece.
00:11:51Very common film.
00:11:57You're never going to be filmed again.
00:11:59Gonzalo was hungry to know the world, but less than eager to be known by it.
00:12:04You see, the French, they're stolen, the French, they're returning, and then they sent back
00:12:08to Italy because they had the best restores.
00:12:10We know it was stolen, but you don't mind to fix for us.
00:12:17Listen, it's no bracket to me.
00:12:18You're not filming.
00:12:19A lot of good people.
00:12:28Oh, is it?
00:12:30They didn't even meet yet, my mom.
00:12:32Fifty-five.
00:12:34Oh.
00:12:34You can't, please.
00:12:35Take off the.
00:12:36The battery's on here.
00:12:37It's just the battery.
00:12:38No, you're filming.
00:12:39No, don't do that.
00:12:40Not very candid, huh?
00:12:43Instead, Gonzalo preferred to reveal himself through his work, a jumble of clues that point
00:12:49to his varied preoccupations and obsessions.
00:12:52No, no, don't do that.
00:13:22No, no, don't do that.
00:13:52Gonzalo's loft was a world apart from the city.
00:14:09In its rooms, it could be any century.
00:14:12He hand-built his living spaces like sculpture and sculpture's divided rooms.
00:14:17Dust from chiseled stone blanketed every surface.
00:14:21Thousands of books piled high lined the walls with titles like The Plundered Past, The Survival
00:14:27of Pagan Gods, A Mayan Grammar, Homeric Greek for Beginners, Diary of a Seducer, Discourses
00:14:34of the Buddha, A Platonic Labyrinth, Artists of the Tundra and the Sea.
00:14:38Gonzalo read voraciously, alternating between book and chisel, finding in an obscure passage
00:14:45a clue, the ignition to some new form, the motivation for a play of shape.
00:14:51Gonzalo made no distinction between work and life.
00:14:54His sculptures were not product, but process, a way of existing between hand and mind, materiality
00:15:01and imagination.
00:15:04Behind a hidden door adjacent to his bedroom was a secret chamber.
00:15:09Gonzalo called it the Sancto Sanctorum.
00:15:11An encyclopedia of civilization and its traces, spanning thousands of years, originating from
00:15:21every corner of the globe.
00:15:24From floor to ceiling, Gonzalo arranged hundreds of artifacts.
00:15:28Mycenaean and Maasai, Egyptian and Cycladic, Inuit and Aboriginal, Incan and Han.
00:15:34Each object gestured to a world.
00:15:41They stood for a deep and elusive realm of myths, dreams, rites, entire systems of thought
00:15:47and practices of being.
00:15:58These objects carried a spirit that Gonzalo replicated in his own work.
00:16:03These artifacts were signs of a universal vocabulary of humanity, from which Gonzalo drew his own
00:16:10artistic language.
00:16:18That artistic language was hard won and not easily mastered.
00:16:23It took Gonzalo over half of his life to discover his voice in stone.
00:16:27His was a language with an ancient grammar and revolutionary conjugations.
00:16:34To find his voice, Gonzalo stepped outside of himself, journeying as far as he could, reaching
00:16:41back through time.
00:16:42It all started in Venice, on the Grand Canal, when 11-year-old Gonzalo declared to his family
00:16:52that he would become an artist.
00:16:56His sense of myth already evident.
00:16:58It was in 1933, on a six-month-long trip to Europe with his family, that Gonzalo first felt
00:17:04the true weight of art, and the magnitude of history.
00:17:16For another boy, this artistic impulse might have been a childish whim, but Gonzalo returned
00:17:22home to Montevideo, Uruguay with a mission.
00:17:24Right away, he transformed his family's basement into a studio and began to work.
00:17:32In a family of vibrant intellects and inventors, Gonzalo stood out.
00:17:36He was the rebellious artist.
00:17:39Coming of age in Montevideo in the 1940s, Gonzalo's mind robed widely, far beyond the limits of
00:17:46his time and place.
00:17:48At his Jesuit high school, Gonzalo wrote a lengthy dissertation renouncing God.
00:17:53At 17, Gonzalo encountered a man who would shape his artistic destiny, the firebrand modernist
00:18:00artist Joaquin Torres-Garcia.
00:18:03Torres-Garcia was already one of the most influential artists of his generation.
00:18:08Originally from Uruguay, he worked, experimented, and exhibited with some of Europe's leading
00:18:13avant-garde, Teo Van Dosberg, Pete Mondrian, Hans Arp, Pablo Picasso, Juan Miró.
00:18:18Back in Uruguay, Torres-Garcia pursued an original and all-encompassing language of art based
00:18:26on elemental forms, signs, and figures.
00:18:30The goal was to use art to create, in his words, an abstract logic to the world.
00:18:35Torres-Garcia called this new artistic order universal constructivism.
00:18:40Sleepy Montevideo became the epicenter of a new movement.
00:18:43Gonzalo dropped his pursuit of a university degree in architecture to jump aboard.
00:18:50Gonzalo's father viewed Torres-Garcia as a radical, an agitator who could be a dangerous influence.
00:18:57As Gonzalo rejected the bourgeois expectations of his family in favor of his apprenticeship
00:19:02with Torres-Garcia, the relationship between father and son frayed.
00:19:06The growing tension erupted.
00:19:09At a nightly family dinner, Gonzalo's father mocked Torres-Garcia.
00:19:14The 18-year-old Gonzalo stood up from the dining table and walked out the door.
00:19:19He did not speak to his father for the next 10 years.
00:19:24Gonzalo forged his independence by moving into an abandoned tower in a nearby park,
00:19:29making the decrepit space his own.
00:19:31It became the first of many reclaimed and improvised studios.
00:19:34From these primitive heights, Gonzalo committed himself to a new and explorative practice of art.
00:19:41The Tayer Torres-Garcia was a laboratory in which a group of young artists experimented with a new formal vocabulary
00:20:06under the dogmatic leadership of Joaquin Torres-Garcia.
00:20:11One of the first students of the Tayer, Gonzalo was an active, though sometimes enigmatic, presence.
00:20:17He prized the instruction of Torres-Garcia and took naturally to the geometric possibilities of the Tayer's methods.
00:20:23The use of pre-modern signs and pre-Columbian symbols defined the Tayer style.
00:20:43Yet increasingly, Gonzalo felt constricted by the limits of the artistic language prescribed by Torres-Garcia.
00:20:49He wanted to go deeper and get to the core of the mysteries and meaning behind the forms.
00:20:58The death of Torres-Garcia in 1949 uprooted Gonzalo.
00:21:02There was nothing left for him in Uruguay.
00:21:06With no master to follow, already proficient within the creative boundaries of Montevideo,
00:21:11Gonzalo set out to track down the spirit that animated his artistic impulses.
00:21:15In 1950, in the dark of night, with little more than the clothes on his back,
00:21:22Gonzalo boarded a cargo ship named the Tacoma, bound for Europe.
00:21:28Uruguay receded into the distance as dreams of archaic glory, distant gods, and mythic lands
00:21:34carried the 28-year-old across the Atlantic.
00:21:37Camera in hand, documenting his travels in photographs and sketches,
00:21:53Gonzalo made his way through a world he had studied and imagined for years.
00:21:57As he moved through Sicily and Greece, impressions washed over him.
00:22:04In harbors, he sketched portraits to pay his fare to the next destination.
00:22:09He sailed to Crete and on to Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.
00:22:13He found work on archaeological digs.
00:22:16He was brought to life by the hints and mysteries pulled up from beneath the dirt.
00:22:20He discovered how inert material took sacred form.
00:22:28He saw Petra and Palmyra, a new sense of scale and proportion, physical and temporal, electrified Gonzalo.
00:22:35He made his way south to Egypt.
00:22:47He traveled up the Nile, crossed the Nubian desert, and made it to Khartoum in Sudan.
00:22:59Gonzalo contracted a virus in his eyes and nearly went blind.
00:23:03A doctor noticed Gonzalo sick in the streets and nursed him back to health,
00:23:07an intervention that saved the eyesight of this budding artist.
00:23:13Gonzalo studied and analyzed all he saw.
00:23:17He scrutinized his reactions and sensations.
00:23:20He contrasted ancient cultures with one another,
00:23:23and with the teaching of Torres Garcia.
00:23:27From Dendera, he described a conversion of sorts.
00:23:30There was a tunnel going down a stairway, very long, and lighted with candles.
00:23:34You could see figures and more figures, suns, forms of all sorts.
00:23:39I had a sensation close to the vertigo you feel when you're at a height,
00:23:43and I suddenly thought that, as I was going down and continued underground,
00:23:47I was entering further inside that world,
00:23:49and that it wasn't art.
00:23:51It was an initiation to a certain knowledge.
00:23:54He had entered another realm.
00:23:59Inside of him, myth merged with fresh observation.
00:24:03Antique forms took modern shape.
00:24:06Torres Garcia's influence receded,
00:24:08and Gonzalo's own spirit began to find its form.
00:24:12Gonzalo was transformed by a new sense of scale,
00:24:15that of a man measured alongside the immensity of history.
00:24:19Gonzalo landed in Paris.
00:24:41He painted on scraps of cardboard and sketched with salvaged coal.
00:24:45He often went days without eating.
00:24:46He spent time in Madrid and Rome,
00:24:52painting and practicing ceramics.
00:24:57He exhibited work wherever and however he could.
00:25:04He chased down archaeological sites with a vigorous curiosity.
00:25:11His hands were always at one craft or another.
00:25:14He was in pursuit of a vision just beginning to form.
00:25:23In Uruguay, Gonzalo had been a student.
00:25:26But these years overseas liberated Gonzalo.
00:25:29Working in the shadows of antiquity,
00:25:32he tasted creative freedom.
00:25:33Plans to travel to Japan were derailed one afternoon at a cafe in Rome.
00:25:49A lovely young American took a seat next to Gonzalo in a cafe.
00:25:53She carried flowers and wore a bright red dress.
00:25:56I'm also American, Gonzalo exclaimed.
00:25:59South American.
00:26:01Her name was Elizabeth Kaplan, and she was from New York.
00:26:05Young, beautiful, and precocious,
00:26:07she had come to Rome to pursue her work as a painter.
00:26:10The two young artists fell quickly in love.
00:26:14Within a year, the two married in Tangiers.
00:26:16Not incidentally, the couple's union inspired Gonzalo to reunite with both of his parents
00:26:22for the first time since leaving home at 18.
00:26:26The young couple moved to Uruguay and reconnected with Gonzalo's old colleagues and family.
00:26:32Gonzalo had grown.
00:26:34He was not the same man who had left Uruguay six years prior.
00:26:37Again, death pushed Gonzalo from Uruguay.
00:26:45His oldest brother, Rodolfo, at 36, a brilliant lawyer, wise beyond his years,
00:26:51died unexpectedly of a heart condition.
00:26:56Grief and a sense that more awaited them beyond the horizon
00:26:59propelled Gonzalo and Elizabeth north.
00:27:07It was the end of the 1950s,
00:27:30and New York thrummed with the energy of the new world.
00:27:32Within six years, Elizabeth and Gonzalo had four children,
00:27:38Kina, Bruno, Caio, and Isabel.
00:27:41He had an entirely new life and a young, glowing family.
00:27:48He arrived in New York.
00:27:50He looked outside the window,
00:27:53and you could see all the windows open
00:27:55and what people were doing in their homes.
00:27:58And he says, everybody was painting.
00:27:59So he says, painting should be forbidden
00:28:05under penalty of death.
00:28:07You know, if you paint it, you risk death penalty.
00:28:11So you have to be so committed and so brave
00:28:14to paint that you risk being, you know, killed.
00:28:19I mean, those are incredible thoughts.
00:28:21He always had these ideas that were very, very extreme,
00:28:26very radical, but incredibly original.
00:28:28So that made him so fascinating.
00:28:33Beginning in the 1960s,
00:28:35Gonzalo's work evolved dramatically and rapidly.
00:28:39In New York, Gonzalo discovered, as he put it,
00:28:41an orgy of materials.
00:28:43Wood, plaster, clay, and cement supplanted paint on canvas.
00:28:47He played with texture
00:28:48and experimented with three-dimensional work.
00:28:51It was no longer possible to simply call Gonzalo a painter.
00:28:56His time in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa
00:28:59freed Gonzalo from the constraints of his early training.
00:29:02New York freed Gonzalo from tradition altogether.
00:29:05Gonzalo worked on commissions for playgrounds and public projects.
00:29:13He found himself building on an architectural scale.
00:29:17He was moving very quickly.
00:29:19The impulse to build followed Gonzalo everywhere.
00:29:32Even a family outing to the beach became creative territory,
00:29:36a place to make dreamlands.
00:29:38Go to Seattle and whatever it is.
00:30:36This period of time was marked by joyful experimentation and artistic growth.
00:30:49But as an artist, Gonzalo was seeking something that eluded him in playgrounds and sandcastles.
00:30:55His eye for form and sense of myth was not yet satisfied.
00:30:59His keen intellect ever roaming needed more.
00:31:06Gonzalo's notebooks evidence a vigorous mind engrossed in study and play.
00:31:23In them, he tested ideas and sketched possibilities.
00:31:28He mapped winds and parsed words to their deepest roots.
00:31:31Inventions and riddles and the wisdom of thousands of years jostle the pages.
00:32:01And this past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past pastral past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past present past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past past
00:32:31Gonzalo's art conversed with voices that echoed through millennia.
00:32:59By the end of the 1960s, Gonzalo's interest in discrete forms had given way to the construction
00:33:05of entire worlds.
00:33:07His work, like his thinking, was becoming monumental.
00:33:12The themes and structures that had taken hold of Gonzalo's practice required a medium that
00:33:17could express their anachronistic force and their expanding dimension.
00:33:22What Gonzalo needed was stone.
00:33:32It took a 200-million-year metamorphosis to form the marble-rich mountains of northern
00:33:37Tuscany.
00:33:38For the past 2,000 years, men have pried apart these hills to release giant blocks of stone.
00:33:46In 1968, Gonzalo first visited Ceravezza and the nearby quarries above Pietrasanta, Quercetta,
00:33:53and Carrara, epicenters of stone sculpture, the source of perfect statuary marble.
00:34:00He fell naturally into this world of artists, artisans, stonemasons, and quarrymen, all working
00:34:06in concert, practicing techniques that dated back to the Roman age, living off a local
00:34:11material so coveted that Michelangelo himself established his own quarry here.
00:34:19Gonzalo discovered a shepherd's house built in 1678, which he promptly bought and named
00:34:24the loghetto, the little place.
00:34:27Stone walls teetering on a mountainside with an abandoned quarry as a backyard.
00:34:32It was perfect.
00:34:34The loghetto became Gonzalo's newest laboratory.
00:34:37L'Aversilia, terra privilegiata dalla natura.
00:34:50Uno stupendo paesaggio, come un immenso anfiteatro, degrada dai dirupi marmorei dei Monti
00:34:55Apuani attraverso un fitto bosco mediterraneo sino alla lucente spiaggia marina.
00:35:01Il silenzio dei ripidi pendii è rotto dai motori dei camion, che nel diuturno flusso e riflusso
00:35:07portano giù il nutrimento per la gente della Versilia, il marmo.
00:35:12I blocchi di marmo pregiato che transitano per le strade portano dentro l'idea di un
00:35:17lavoro creativo.
00:35:20In questa terra il marmo è tutto, lavoro, arte, tradizione, cultura, vita.
00:35:37La scultura di Gonzalo non aveva bisogno dell'artigiano, la scultura di Gonzalo era una situazione
00:35:49che lui trovava alla pietra, a sua forma e somiglianza, dove poi interveniva con pochi tagli, con i
00:35:56buchi che faceva già inseriva tutta la sua poetica, la sua personalità , non aveva bisogno,
00:36:05quindi era come un dipingere, fare dei segni sulla pietra, lui faceva segni sulla pietra.
00:36:13Sono facciate piene di questi buchi, perché poi riporta tutto quello che è la cultura antica
00:36:25che lui non aveva, a tutti.
00:36:32Gaia!
00:36:39Guai!
00:36:40Eee
00:36:49Eee
00:36:55Eee
00:37:00With stone, Gonzalo practiced magic.
00:37:21He chose a block of stone for its character and then developed it,
00:37:25carving suggestive niches, elaborating a playful scale,
00:37:29striking a balance between raw shape and subtle human intervention.
00:37:36Gonzalo discovered entire worlds within a block of stone, no matter its size.
00:37:42In the Loghetto's solitude, with a perspective drawn from these ancient hills,
00:37:47Gonzalo invented an artistic language.
00:37:52Gonzalo wanted to create a playful absence,
00:37:56stone that could be read like a sentence without vowels,
00:37:59only enough context to suggest definition.
00:38:03He crafted sparse structures in whose spaces and higher histories could be glimpsed.
00:38:09He loved turning inert rock into a world unto itself.
00:38:15Gonzalo worked stone differently than the community of sculptors who congregated in Saravetza.
00:38:19Self-taught, his tactics ranged from masterful to primitive.
00:38:25He never sought finesse or a delicate rendering.
00:38:28He preferred a rough, rudimentary approach.
00:38:31He never relied on assistants or artisans.
00:38:34He always worked the stone on his own.
00:38:35The process of constructing was a captivating game.
00:38:39You have to make the lock and then make the key, he would say.
00:38:44Each stone was a puzzle, a balance of proportion, scale and angle,
00:38:48an interplay of form, shape and size,
00:38:50an invitation to imagine, reference and travel through time.
00:38:53Because of the towering quarries, the ancient tradition and the artistic infrastructure,
00:39:05working stone in Italy meant working stone on the largest scale,
00:39:08and Gonzalo experimented widely.
00:39:13The Leggetto was a private empire, a place out of time,
00:39:17where Gonzalo labored in joyful solitude, entirely dedicated to his vision.
00:39:22Free to execute work on a monumental scale,
00:39:24he gathered stones around him, displaying them for the wind and stars,
00:39:28letting them play against one another.
00:39:34He would spend half of every year here in Italy,
00:39:36an annual counterbalance to his life in New York.
00:39:42He sculpted for himself, according to interior laws and whims.
00:39:47This was Gonzalo's soulful kingdom,
00:39:49echoing with his language and graced with his monuments.
00:40:06If you go to Italy, you run into a lot of very...
00:40:34very serious sculptures, they're looking for the perfect block of solid, white, statuary,
00:40:42or they'll be looking for something that's completely faultless and cubed up.
00:40:47And Gonzalo was always looking for stuff that had already had a life,
00:40:51stuff, I mean, which is usually referred to as junk,
00:40:55but he would look for stuff that had a patina,
00:40:57that already had some time on it,
00:40:59and then refine or unrefine it to fit his own narrative.
00:41:05So,
00:41:10so,
00:41:11so,
00:41:15so,
00:41:16so,
00:41:17so,
00:41:17so,
00:41:55Back in New York, far from the stone-rich Italian mountains,
00:42:21Gonzalo used the metropolis as his own personal quarry.
00:42:24His friends and children scoured the city in search of construction or demolition sites.
00:42:30Gonzalo would buy, or often steal in the dark of night,
00:42:33old cornerstones, frontispieces, and discarded masonry of limestone or brownstone.
00:42:38In the dark of night, he and his co-conspirators would wheel these scavenged stones
00:42:42through the city streets back to his studio.
00:42:45The work Gonzalo produced in Manhattan was literally of the city itself.
00:42:49Gonzalo gave himself fully to his studies, to his thinking and reading, and to his carving.
00:42:58His practice required a determined focus that left him distant, sometimes inaccessible.
00:43:03I remember one day he said, who is an artist?
00:43:08An artist is somebody who dedicates her life, his life, or their entire life to do this.
00:43:15Not an amateur, a weekend painter is not an artist.
00:43:18A weekend artist, it's not a real artist.
00:43:21Whatever they do, could be good or bad, but an artist, if he dedicates his life to do this.
00:43:30He didn't change his art, his life of art, whatever happens.
00:43:37Maybe it's a good thing or not so good for his family because he was not a perfect father.
00:43:43But he knew his time was not eternal, and even when he was young, you know, he said,
00:43:50I have to work, I have to work, I can't spend a moment of my life without doing this.
00:43:56And he did it.
00:43:58He did it until the last day.
00:44:02Gonzalo's single-mindedness, his devotion to his vision and his work, left little room for much else.
00:44:07His artistic pursuits made marriage difficult and family life strained.
00:44:19In 1974, he and Elizabeth separated, and Gonzalo drifted off into his own world.
00:44:26He moved to the loft on Great Jones Street in Manhattan's East Village.
00:44:30The apartment, with its dusty studio and hidden Sancto Sanctorum, was a private space, his own universe.
00:44:41It was there, working alone, that Gonzalo labored to master his vision, to give it wholeness and depth.
00:44:48His vision only blossomed with time, reflection, and increasingly, with solitude.
00:45:00Visions flooded his mind.
00:45:05Gonzalo's inner and outer worlds offered a bazaar of forms.
00:45:10Characters, shapes, ruins, half-imagined, half-referenced, merged into creations wholly his own.
00:45:15To belee.
00:45:17To belee, to beleeful.
00:45:17To belee, to belee.
00:45:18In April, reincarn
00:46:46Yeah, but there's no perfect translation in the end.
00:46:49Enigmas were, you know, he made all these pieces full of crypts, you know, the crypt, for
00:46:55him, you know, Egypt with all these tombs that you have to go down, you know, the fact
00:47:00that you had like a sarcophage, you know, how many times he made sarcophage, something
00:47:06which was buried, something which was hidden, something which was, you need to open it up
00:47:13to see it, you know, how many pieces he made with the, you know, the thing that you could
00:47:18actually owe, you know, discover, you know, so mystery, he would dig in, you know, and
00:47:27then Enigma, yeah, Enigma, how did I do that?
00:47:31How did they do that?
00:51:15Gonzalo sat quietly outside the art world, but stood firmly at the center of his own
00:51:19creative universe.
00:51:21He labored tirelessly and accomplished much.
00:51:26In 1968, Gonzalo was commissioned to build a public artwork for the Olympic Games in
00:51:34Mexico City.
00:51:36He designed a tower, a 36-foot-tall concrete structure, a whimsical display of his work
00:51:42on a truly monumental scale.
00:51:47He participated in art shows and had his own work displayed in museums and exhibitions
00:51:51in the U.S., Brazil, Venezuela, Spain, Italy.
00:51:57Jorge Luis Borges and Marcel Duchamp were dinner guests in his home.
00:52:02He knew Louise Bourgeois, remembered Franz Klein as a simple man like his paintings, and recalled
00:52:07that de Kooning was very demanding on the girls.
00:52:12Gonzalo and Isamu Noguchi became close while working at the same stone yard in Italy, kindred
00:52:18spirits, both quite solitary.
00:52:23Yet as his vision grew more distinct, so did the contrast between Gonzalo and the art world.
00:52:28Increasingly, he loathed its fanfare and artifice.
00:52:31Gonzalo seemed to empathize with a quote from Marcel Duchamp, who wrote that the more I
00:52:36live among artists, the more I'm convinced that they're fakes from the moment they get
00:52:40to be successful in the smallest way.
00:52:44Gonzalo believed in an art made for its own sake, and he felt increasingly alone in its pursuit.
00:52:51He wrote that his colleagues from Uruguay could only judge his work by the 1940 standards of
00:52:55the Taire, that friends and fellow artists in Italy were too involved in the work and its
00:52:59production to have any real perspective, and that in New York he could not share his anxieties
00:53:04and concerns with anyone.
00:53:07You have to rely on yourself only, wrote Gonzalo.
00:53:10I guess you build your own amphitheater with your own public in yourself, and then dialogue
00:53:14with them, still inside yourself.
00:53:19Despite his feelings of isolation and his misgivings about the art world, he persisted, confident
00:53:24in his practice, buoyed by the serious artists that he admired and the history that he brought
00:53:29forth.
00:53:31In 1990, Gonzalo represented Uruguay at the Venice Biennale.
00:53:37Despite the great honor, Gonzalo remained more content making work than showing it.
00:53:42He was always uneasy in a gallery, put off by the crowds and formalities.
00:53:47He would often say that an artist should be judged by the numbers of exhibitions he declines.
00:53:53A man apart, he was most himself in a stone yard, with a chisel in hand.
00:53:57Or in his quarry, his work's truest setting, his amphitheater.
00:54:09Gonzalo was never done.
00:54:11His sculptures existed in a state of slow, meticulous change.
00:54:16But it was only when a piece left his studio that it was truly finished.
00:54:20He therefore kept most works around, watching their textures change and erode, and the ground
00:54:25become firm under their weight.
00:54:28My father, especially in the last 10 or 15 years, receded from exhibiting to some degree.
00:54:35His relationship with selling his work was curious, in that he wanted to make the minimum amount
00:54:41of money to keep going.
00:54:44And this was not an affectation of his.
00:54:46I think it was his way, in some way, of just rejecting a kind of commercial aspect.
00:54:53And also a kind of sense that the honor and the rightness of what he was doing should ultimately
00:55:00prevail.
00:55:02Or that it was an expression of his faith in that process.
00:55:06But he very much was, and he said he was, he was a studio artist.
00:55:12That's where he lived and breathed.
00:55:13And he was not out there as a promoter for himself.
00:55:17He was a working artist, and he sort of had this right or wrong, old school or not view
00:55:26that the work would ultimately, whatever virtues it had, would speak for itself.
00:55:33Certainly in his later years, I think he, you know, he said to me, you know, artists want
00:55:41money or fame or any other thing, but he was certain he wanted time.
00:55:47Time.
00:55:51Time to continue digging through the world.
00:55:55Time to continue to refine his vision, to simplify his expression.
00:56:01Time to watch age wear down his sculptures, to break his stones into even smaller, even
00:56:06more evocative fragments.
00:56:08Or maybe just time to keep working.
00:56:18Time to find his work.
00:56:20So much of what Gonzalo loved bore the scars of time, the patina of age.
00:56:26He loved ruins and sites or objects whose incomplete, broken-up form required the imagination to fill
00:56:32in the backstory.
00:56:34Gonzalo put his faith in time.
00:56:41He wrote of his admiration for Franz Schubert, for his brilliance and his poverty.
00:56:47As Gonzalo had it, Schubert could not afford a piano and never heard his last piece, the
00:56:49Quintet and C, which he wrote just before his death.
00:56:52never heard his last piece, The Quintet in C, which he wrote just before his death.
00:56:58None of his friends, wrote Gonzalo, made any effort to advance his cause. None attempted
00:57:03to raise him from the bleak obscurity which he accepted with such gentle and undemanding
00:57:07complacency. Surely they cannot have sensed that a man of Schubert's phenomenal humility
00:57:13could not be trusted to promote his own success.
00:57:22As A
00:57:52He just didn't have time for it.
00:57:56I really feel that he felt under pressure with time.
00:57:58He had a lot of work that he wanted to do,
00:58:01and it took a long time to do it by himself, with a chisel.
00:58:06It took a long time.
00:58:07It's funny, he cared about immortality.
00:58:10I mean, he cared about sort of the true art world, if you will,
00:58:15that his work would be of lasting significance.
00:58:19Of course he cared about that.
00:58:20And I think any artist who's serious cares about that.
00:58:23He made the decision later on, especially,
00:58:27that he just wasn't going to use his time for that.
00:58:31He wasn't, he just, he was going to do the thing that no one else could do,
00:58:34which was to make the work.
00:58:50He was born, she's on my heart to be.
00:58:55He was born, she's on my heart to be.
00:58:59He was born, she, he's on my mind.
00:59:05He shared his art and he's on my mind.
00:59:08Here's a shame
00:59:19That is this path to me
00:59:28In these an hour
00:59:32In these an hour
00:59:38Man first used stone to craft rudimentary tools and weapons millions of years ago.
01:00:05Temples were built of stone.
01:00:08Pyramids. Entire empires.
01:00:13Somewhere along the way man made art out of stone.
01:00:17Sculpture. Stone as symbol.
01:00:26Humans have spent millennia cutting shape out of stone.
01:00:30Using their hands to rend meaning out of rock.
01:00:33Gonzalo gloried in this tradition, in the work it required and all it stood for.
01:00:40He made that tradition his own.
01:00:41By the end of his life, Gonzalo embodied the very meaning of stone.
01:00:49By the end of his life, Gonzalo embodied the very meaning of stone.
01:00:59In Jefferson's monument, there's not a tomb there but it's a monument to it.
01:01:00No.
01:01:01No.
01:01:02No.
01:01:03No.
01:01:04No.
01:01:05No.
01:01:06No.
01:01:07No.
01:01:08No.
01:01:09No.
01:01:10No.
01:01:11No.
01:01:12No.
01:01:13No.
01:01:14No.
01:01:15No.
01:01:16No.
01:01:17No.
01:01:18No.
01:01:19No.
01:01:20No.
01:01:21No.
01:01:22No.
01:01:23No.
01:01:24No.
01:01:25No.
01:01:26No.
01:01:27No.
01:01:28No.
01:01:29that what he left behind would outlast him he took care to make the most of
01:01:35his time alive a stretch of days who span he knew to be minuscule in the
01:01:40scale of eternity Gonzalo revered vessels that shuttled one from here to
01:01:46the afterlife and back again he knew that we moved through a world occupied
01:01:51by the dead an ever layering accumulation of the past he dug through
01:01:56these layers he searched for the deepest veins he sought gems amongst the strata
01:02:04he journeyed through life by looking to the dead by learning from those long
01:02:09past by seeking beauty and mystery and truth in the clues and fragments left
01:02:13behind it was death that brought Gonzalo to stone in the first place in 1964
01:02:23Gonzalo made a headstone for the grave of a friend which the Queen's Cemetery
01:02:27rejected it was Gonzalo's first stone membra disjecta
01:02:32of the many deaths that pushed Gonzalo in one direction or another over the course
01:02:41of his life the death of his oldest son Bruno in 1994 wounded him most profoundly a
01:02:48brilliant painter himself Bruno died at 36 for Gonzalo there were no pieces he
01:02:56could pick up and reassemble in the wake of the loss of his own child in his own
01:02:59lifetime it was a heartbreaking confirmation of Gonzalo's own anxiety about
01:03:05time
01:03:12now the body is already called a cenotaph
01:03:13sarcophagus means the stone they eat the fish
01:03:17phagos is food you know
01:03:19sarcophagus means human flesh
01:03:23and they used to say the ancient and in certain models they were eating away the fish
01:03:31the lion
01:03:33sarcophagus
01:03:34sarcophagus
01:03:35sarcophagus
01:03:36sarcophagus
01:03:37sarcophagus
01:03:38recorded for all time
01:03:41this was the first darling I did
01:03:43one of his daughter told me once oh he did what he wanted you know at the end he is a man that showed
01:03:58some count a certain pursuing you know a certain you know the steadiness the fact that in the spring he would come in the fall he would go you know this kind of the the vision I have of Gonzalo it's a man that had found a certain balance you know and
01:04:27and
01:04:29and
01:04:30and search was his uh main friend you know he was a man of search
01:04:34you know he was a man of search
01:04:36in
01:04:38in June of 1997 Gonzalo flew from New York to Italy he kissed the tarmac upon his arrival in Pisa as he was driven home from the airport he quietly commented on favorite sites along the route
01:04:39at home exhausted Gonzalo went to bed early
01:04:46when he noticed that his bedside reading
01:04:48and
01:04:49and
01:04:50and
01:04:52and
01:04:54and
01:04:56and
01:04:57and
01:04:59and
01:05:00and
01:05:02and
01:05:03and
01:05:04and
01:05:06and
01:05:08and
01:05:10and
01:05:14to the house's caretaker.
01:05:15That's how I want to go out, like a light bulb.
01:05:19By the next morning, Gonzalo was dead.
01:05:26A peculiar knowingness surrounded Gonzalo's passing.
01:05:29A neighbor mentioned being visited by Gonzalo
01:05:31in a dream that night, only to wake to news of his death.
01:05:35Another friend described a swarm of fireflies
01:05:37around the legato that same evening.
01:05:41He had long told friends and family members
01:05:43that he wanted to be buried in Serevetsa,
01:05:46laid to rest beside carvers and quarrymen
01:05:49in the shadow of those great hills.
01:05:51So, I'm going to take a look at this.
01:05:56I'm going to take a look at this.
01:05:58I'm going to take a look at this.
01:06:35Stone is just stone.
01:06:52I mean, you find a lump of stone on the street and it is what it is.
01:06:55But when you look at a piece of stone in a demolition and you look at one of my father's
01:07:00sculptures and you wonder what has to have happened for that piece to suddenly no longer
01:07:06just be a lump of stone and have a kind of wonderful artistic incantation about it.
01:07:13And that is an alchemy that he invented and he executed.
01:07:18And I think that he really lived for that.
01:07:23And it's all there in his work.
01:07:25And when he told me, don't worry about expressing yourself, your entire personality and everything
01:07:32will be in your work.
01:07:34And it really is such a true statement, at least in his case.
01:07:37Gonzalo Fonseca's life recedes further into the past.
01:07:51Whether his work will be excavated, exhumed, dusted off and reassembled remains an open question.
01:07:56Will it be brought back into the present, beautiful evidence of something once great?
01:08:04Will his work be lit by gallery lights or covered in vines?
01:08:09Will future generations take stock of his vision and make use of that wisdom?
01:08:13Or will his stone sink back into the soil?
01:08:22Gonzalo would have embraced any of time's whims.
01:08:25Any outcome.
01:08:27Any fate.
01:08:43Any outcome.