A timelessly contemplative figure
The word Passage can perhaps be interpreted in several ways. On my mobile phone, it serves as the headline for four images of a sculpture, a building crowned with a head – an unknown character. A timelessly contemplative figure with a pointed cone on its head.
The work Passage cannot easily be dated.
The sender is the artist Bertil Vallien, known as the creator of glass boats, represented in many international collections. He casts his vessels in various sizes, enclosing in the glass mass a medley of stories, scenographically expressed through all the charged objects frozen in their swirling moments. Narratives that encourage private interpretations, while remaining universal. Some of the largest glass boats are four meters long and serve as landmarks in public spaces. Others are part of large private art collections.
The work Passage opens a new stage. Seen on my phone, the sculpture’s material becomes indistinct, almost difficult to perceive. It turns out to be cast aluminum in a rugged and brushed version, far from the transparency that glass conveys.
Bertil Vallien describes the transition from a glassworks to a foundry for aluminum with a mix of concern and fascination. It’s a passage filled with doubt, but also growth in a new direction. Perhaps best of all, it is filled with challenges. Initially, the concern was how to tame the gray surface of aluminum. An unfounded worry that turned into joy as conversations over a coffee in the dark foundry resulted in different solutions, where materials and possibilities challenged his creativity.
Passage has both a front and a back: a figure communicating with the world in many directions. The pointed hat of the Passage figure should be interpreted as a wick to the light. The light that has been a part of the inherent attraction of glass, until now. On the back of the work, there is an important clue, an inscription: ‘Time mocks everything. But the pyramid mocks time.’
The encounter with Roman antiquity began with a trip to Venice and ended with a visit to an exhibition in Lucca. There he found a sculpture with the same poignant message about time – but, of course, in Latin. His house, the closed, almost secretive building with an inscription on the back, and a front with a portal and eight small polished square windows – or is it something else – makes him associate with Kafka in his own narrative and lightly travestied version: ‘Many a House is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.’
Perhaps time is not mocked by Passage. The movement continues.
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Text: Hedvig Hedqvist, Design writer, and author.
