Rivers of words have been and continue to be written about thinking the contemporary in sacred space, which I sometimes find devoid of adherence to much more banal realities. My personal idea is based on a few essential principles. Uniqueness, dynamics, complexity, harmony, energy. The definition of contemporary is a consequence, not the style framework to rely on as happens in many cases. Those who deal with the sacred should always remember, like their clients, that what is at stake is not the taste of this or that, convenience or compliance with small vanities. At stake is the story with which, for better or for worse, the symbols created will be confronted.
Altar Church of Olmo pilot project CEI Raul Gabriel ©
Grafting is a vital operation of living experience, not the application of aesthetic ideological forms which, however refined, fail in an essential task for the sacred space: the identity which is the consequence of a presence. The presence of a form capable of sending all the strength of the symbol back to that place, to that history, to that cultural context, not to another. The sacred does not provide generic solutions applicable in a more or less modular form, with a few friezes here and there that have no value other than mere furnishing of the environment. Sacred is also religious but it goes much further. The sacred is the constitutive dimension of ubiquitous existence and devoid of aesthetic elections, as is believed. As far as I'm concerned, each project is the result of a total immersion in the place, a contact through osmosis that is sometimes easier, other times less so. Nothing less than the always final challenge of giving a form to the mystery, to what cannot be explained and which only poetry, the hard and direct authentic poetry of forms, can attempt to resonate.
Raul Gabriel with HE Monsignor Guido Marini, HE Monsignor Vittorio Viola secretary of the Vatican Divine Worship department, Lelia Rozzo responsible for cultural heritage of the Diocese of Tortona at the presentation of Raul Gabriel's project for the 12th century Cistercian abbey of Rivalta Scrivia October 2023
The project for the Cistercian abbey of Rivalta Scrivia, 12th century.
The project for such a significant place from a historical and symbolic point of view allowed me to show the validity of the philological method which allows the ancient to be combined with contemporary thought. There it was not required that I bring a foreign body to justify the completely meaningless contemporary label in any case. It was required that I think like a contemporary Cistercian monk to show that continuity is possible if the source is fertile and if those who approach it are of service. Being at service does not in any way affect the novelty, the challenge to manifest itself in a very specific symbolic linguistic fabric, of which every sacred place, and I would say every secular place, is in any case a repository.
Progetto Rivalta Scrivia XII sec Raul Gabriel ©
The sacred as home, the symbol as architecture, the path as a project of shared history, never owned
Symbols are not objects, they are places and as such they underlie an architecture. A completely specific architecture, which is sculpture, which is writing, which is painting, which must be poetry. The moment it is furniture it fails. Taking care of a sacred place is not like taking care of the house of the bourgeois, of this or that. The house is shared but it is the property of no one but itself, it is the property of the sibolo that it somehow embodies. The responsibility is great: if he embodies a weak thought, if he embodies fiction and hypocrisy, cosmetics rather than a completed aesthetic path, he will speak and transmit that, regardless of all the beautiful words one may say and write. Direct encounter is the only decisive force of human journeys. Many clients and executors seem to forget or perhaps are not interested.
Olmo Tabernacle inner structure tech ortho Raul Gabriel ©