Critical Text

Luca Beatrice - The Rock

Xhixha is certainly one of the most interesting sculptors on the contemporary scene, and his work has made its mark in recent years for the originality of the artistic sign and the way the material has been worked. He has used steel more than anything else, modeling and exploiting its reflecting surface, which absorbs everything that surrounds it, duplicating and multiplying every image it meets in its path.

He has placed his great sculptures in the old center of Matera, on the Island of San Servolo in the Venetian lagoon, and at Palazzo Madama in Turin, and he has recently been warmly received by the international public of London. He is clearly an emerging artist, much appreciated by the critics too. It would have been easy for him simply to make a selection of his finest, best-known works and place them in one of the most beautiful squares in Italy. But Helidon is a man who loves challenges, as we can deduce from the picture that emerges re-invent himself. I met him in Pietrasanta while he was working on his new pieces. Together we entered the belly of the Henraux, where the pieces of marble he has chosen were laid out before us, almost helpless and fragile – extraordinary though that seems for a block weighing several tons – waiting for the machines that would forge what the artist had in mind and help him to translate his thought.

That is how the idea for the title of this piece came to me: The Rock, as the power that naked stone expresses is unequalled: you feel cornered, there are no short-cuts or ways out. At first, anyway, it’s stronger than you. To go into battle with it, you need both brain and muscles, intelligence and strength. You can’t be afraid of taking a risk or a gamble.

Five large new marbles by Xhixha will be accompanying the visitors an inhabitants of Versilia in the summer of 2016. And there’smore: his reflections on sculpture involve bronze too, another new material in his career, which, like marble, he is working with for the first time. And metal too is rock: it makes a good sound, a hard sound. Noise at its purest.

Richard Cork  Refractive Vibes

Helidon Xhixha: Searching for the Pulse of Vitality

Last summer, visitors exploring the Venice Biennale were astonished to witness ‘Iceberg’ floating past them along the canals of this vulnerable and beguiling city. But soon enough, surprise gave way to deeper emotions as they realised the full implications of Helidon Xhixha’s provocative sculpture. Although made of stainless steel, its mirror-polished surface was refracted in the Venetian sunlight. The impact of ‘Iceberg’, moving through such an unlikely location, prompted thoughts about a world adrift from its moorings. Although the sculpture was in one sense bulky and rugged, its glinting surface looked strangely elusive as well. After a while ‘Iceberg’ signified the notion of melt-down, inviting everyone to imagine how Venice itself could be overwhelmed all too swiftly by a catastrophic flood.

On another level altogether, this fascinating sculpture offers an insight into the peripatetic life of the man who created it. The passage undertaken by ‘Iceberg’ reflects the restless journeying of Xhixha himself. Although born in Albania, he moved across to Italy and then studied in London before graduating from the Brera Academy in Milan. Like Brancusi, who left his native Romania and later described how he walked all the way to Paris, Xhixha was stimulated by moving. He now divides his time between Italy and Dubai while making work for public locations across the world, but his roots will never be forgotten. One of these monumental pieces is now installed in Tirana, outside the Presidential Palace of the Albanian Republic. Like so many of his mature sculptures, ‘Riflessi di storia’ brings steel and light into an energetic, complex and unpredictable conjunction. The polished metal is alive with reflections of the landscape surrounding the Presidential Palace, yet they all look fractured and distorted. It contrasts absolutely with the calm, classical order of the building, and shows Xhixha’s commitment to visual disturbance.

The longer we look at these works, the more we realise the strength of his involvement with restlessness. He sees himself as ‘a monumental artist’ with an urge to explore a sense of vastness ‘as it is the ultimate expression of the human mind and soul.’ But his monumentalism is the very opposite of ponderous grandiosity. ‘The Coil’, an immense stainless steel sculpture which rises up to a height of 1200 cm, turns and twists through space outside the Arvedi Steel Plant in Cremona. It celebrates both the strength and the suppleness of this tough, glinting material which Xhixha often employs. Curving in one direction with resolute confidence, it then dives off sideways and almost dances in the air. ‘The Coil’ does not rely so much on reflections: it is an intensely linear work which proves that drawing also plays an important role in Xhixha’s creative process. But ‘Riflessi dal cielo’, installed in 2012 among flower-beds and trees near the Lombardy Regional Government Building in Milan, shows his enduring readiness to explore a polished mirror surface. The sculpture confronts viewers and makes them very aware of its solid, three-dimensional presence. At the same time, though, it almost bewilders us with a dizzying, ever-shifting cluster of reflections which draws our attention to the paved ground, natural plants, the structure of nearby buildings and the luminous sky far above.

The variety of Xhixha’s public sculptures is very striking. Outside the Montanstahl building in Stabio, Switzerland, he erected ‘The Three Monoliths’ in 2008. Close inspection reveals that each of these tall, upright pieces has a distinctive surface quite different from its neighbours. One of them is covered with convex forms which seem to bulge in an almost organic way. Yet the monolith next to it is more suggestive of a steeply ascending rock-face, ancient and weather-worn. In this respect, it offers a dramatic contrast with the third monolith, where Xhixha has ensured that precisely defined minimal forms are displayed all over its vertical structure.

During the day, they look predominantly pale grey, whereas at night they are flecked with a surprising range of colours transmitted from the lit-up architecture behind, which also contains a spectacular wall-piece evoking the base of a redoubtable Swiss mountain.

Sometimes, Xhixha’s outdoor monuments possess a relatively soothing character. Take a look at the aptly named ‘Luce’, placed in an open-air setting at St Jean Cap Ferrat. Its curving forms mirror the colours of the water and sky, not to mention the palm trees clustered beyond the pool. ‘Luce’, as its name suggests, has a predominantly beneficent character, and ‘Riflessi Lunari’ goes even further in a healing direction. It is installed at Helsina Healthcare SA, at Pazzallo in Swizerland, where its pair of polished steel forms help to welcome patients and their families whose thoughts may well be dominated by the anxiety of illness. Reminiscent of two crescent moons, ‘Riflessi Lunari’ plays its luminous part in a therapeutic context.

Even so, it would be a mistake to suppose that most of Xhixha’s work is essentially calm and reassuring. He has become fascinated above all by the challenge of conveying a high-energy charge through the sheets of steel deployed in his work. Obsessed in particular with creating an expressive interplay between convex and concave undulations, he makes them reflect the natural world as well as the high-speed dynamism of modern transport. ‘Waterfalls’, a sculpture taking the form of two monoliths, inhabits the Giuseppe Bussolini Square in Padua, a city where Donatello’s eloquent Renaissance sculpture can be found on the altar of Sant’Antonio church.

But ‘Waterfalls’ takes us away from this urban context and evokes the power of water plummeting down a rock-encrusted cliff. The word ‘refraction’, which plays such a central role in understanding Xhixha’s vision, helps us understand how light-waves bend when they come into dramatic contact with the mirrored surface of his sculpture. And in ‘Waterfalls’ he is able to evoke the collision of liquid and rock, enhanced at every turn by the light’s incessant action.
At the opposite extreme, a sculpture called ‘Lighted Runways’ belongs to the world of high-speed jet travel. Its two rectangular columns occupy an indoor location this time, at Terminal 1 in Milan’s Malpensa Airport.

Here, the polished steel forms appear to vibrate with the visual stimulus provided by jets taking off and landing. Often the moments of greatest tension for pilots and passengers alike, both ascent and descent nevertheless provide extraordinary views of a world disappearing and returning. Xhixha’s ‘Lighted Runways’ conveys this frisson of nervous excitement in a very immediate way. Much of the time, though, his work concentrates on references to the natural world. ‘Oceano’, a sculpture installed in Sunny Isles, Florida, possesses a rippling shape evocative of the sea’s incessant motion.

Xhixha’s treatment of the steel now seems filled with tidal commotion. Viewed close-to, it plunges us into the heart of the ocean and we struggle to discover our whereabouts. But a work called ‘Vela’, which has found a highly appropriate home outside the Yacht Club in Monaco, focuses instead on the action of wind. Its form immediately makes us think of a sail, forever being blown in whatever directions the gales or milder gusts command.

Nothing ever stays still in Xhixha’s steel sculpture. He is an artist preoccupied with the inevitability of change, and in ‘Suono d’acciaio’ he is able to evoke the constantly shifting sound of a string instrument. Positioned near the Violin Museum created by Fondazione Stradivari in Cremona, this monumental piece appears to have a musical life of its own. Although resembling a violin, it does not need to rely on a musician. No strings are visible, either. We can imagine ‘Suono d’acciaio’ emitting sounds without any assistance from a violinist. The vivacity of music is summoned to our consciousness solely by Xhixha’s handling of the polished steel, alive with myriad reflections cast by all kinds of organic and structural matter surrounding the sculpture.

Although steel is a quintessentially modern material, used by many leading experimental sculptors during the twentieth century, Xhixha has always been aware of the past as well. Some of his recent pieces are now beginning to incorporate Carrara marble. As for the early works in this exhibition, they are far darker and less reflective than his other sculptures. Ominously, the blackened steel is handled with a greater degree of deliberate roughness. Some of them look like survivors from a mysterious, ancient civilisation, almost as if they have been unearthed by archaeologists searching for evidence of cultures long since overwhelmed by hostile forces and the inevitable passage of time. Xhixha’s early sculpture suggests that he began as an artist haunted by the memory of wartime destruction, and keenly aware of the vulnerable isolationism he witnessed in Albania during his childhood.

Since then his vision has widened and, as ‘Iceberg’ testified in Venice last year, he views the future of our entire planet with mounting alarm. Hence, no doubt, the constant involvement with splintering, breakage and fragmentation in his work as a whole. At the same time, however, he refuses to succumb to any kind of despair.

A spirit of resilience abounds in his sculpture, suggesting that Xhixha feels determined to combat the ever-present threat of dystopia with an affirmative art. It is a passionate defiance, springing from his search for the pulse of vitality which he wants to uncover and celebrate in so many aspects of existence.

Enrico Badellino - Light as Steel, Skira 

Energy, Force, and Light are the words which most often appear in the titles of works by Xhixha. Their precision is eloquent in itself but even more so is the fact that the two synonyms ‘energy’ and ‘force’ repeatedly appear together with the word ‘light’.

The meaning of ‘energy’ can be traced back, in an abstract sense, to ‘work’ insofar as it is an ‘activity’; so it is in no way mistaken to assert that Xhixha’s work, at its root, takes shape as light; or, to shift the terminology, it is as though it sparks off a process aimed at freeing light from the material, in fact even for the material itself to release the light it contains as a sub-species of energy. But, even more than in a metaphorical sense, this statement is true in a literal sense: steel, Xhixha’s favorite material, is not only the final phase of a process that requires extremely high temperatures and a correspondingly high expense of energy, but in its liquid state, when it is ready to be poured, it emanates a blinding light.

So in a certain sense light already exists in Xhixha’s work; it is as though the artist had rediscovered the power for re-evocating it through an activity that, above all, implies a manifestation of energy and force, and that these inevitably lead to the release of light.