MATTHIAS CONTZEN / PORTUGAL

Matthias Contzen (born 1964 in Aschaffenburg, Germany), is a multimedia artist and mainly a sculptor, who lives and works in Cascais, Portugal since 1998. Between 1987 and 1998, the artist studied sculpture, object design and arts at varGerman universities and schools.

In his recent years, Contzen’s works solely with marble, while previously, his sculptures were created out of various materials such as basalt, bronze, diabase, onyx and limestone. For his most famous artworks – Planet Series, the artist creates ivory-colored perforated planets from highest quality Portuguese marble; while Contzen's other most recent style belongs to Torus Series - where the perforatedmarble piece is disk-shaped.

With his sculptures, Contzen aims to decipher the true nature of form, both in themicro and macro structures of various elements. His artworks are influenced by his spiritual attitude, and employ light and sound as material.

From early on in his career, Matthias was inspired by nature itself as well as like-minded artists such as Henry Moore, Max Ernst, and Jean Arp. Contzen was fascinated by an approach devised by Ernst and Arp called Free Association. Byclearing one's mind in a contemplative way, one can catch a glimpse of the essence or "truth" beyond reality. This "truth" can be intuitively translated into a work of art,
away from the ratio and planning of the mind that might lead to "artificial" results. Another concept that inspired Contzen is written in Joachim E. Berendt's book "The World is Sound". Berendt's theory explains that every form on earth is created by sound, and the planets in our solar system are tuned to follow exactly the frequency and proportions of the seven tones in our musical scale.

Many of these theories apply to Contzen’s Planet Series, and the beginning of these series was formed by two factors – one being tired of having a square block as a starting point for a sculpture, and the second – Ernst Hackel’s works on ocean art forms, specifically diatoms, the microstructures of which deeply inspired him. To create lighter, more transparent, highly detailed and precise sculptures, Contzen is using a diamond hollow drill as his main tool to perforate the marble pieces.

The artist describes the working process as less planned and more like a musician’s improvisation. His goal is to transform consciousness directly into matter. He sees the planetary sculptures as a frozen 3D image of the universe, microseconds afterits creation - like a big bang, driven by the power of sound, which incorporates Berendt’s theory. Contzen imagines the materialization of the eternal sacred pattern, the so-called cosmic consciousness, in matter and form. His sculptures follow the guiding principle: emptiness is form – form is emptiness. The viewer sees the light shining through the holes, creating a sacred atmosphere while exuding a feeling of the completeness of the universe.

One of the artist’s career highlights was during autumn 2016, when his project Light of Humanity (image on the left) was selected by Changsha Sculpture Symposium & the City of Changsha, in China, to be placed in front of the Changsha Modern Art Museum.

To explore the depth of The Light of Humanity project and sculpture, we need to look at its design and pattern, which predominantly is circle-shaped and is meant to represent the divine as it contains everything else. The sculpture is composed out of many smaller circles and holes in different sizes, symbolizing a single human and/or groups of humans–all joined in their potential, their energy and creativity and forminto a community, which in this case represents the city of Changsha. Symbolically, every person who lived and lives in this city, has opened a tiny, small, or bigger window to let the divine light penetrate and fertilize the planet and create conditions for humanity to become light and evolve towards the realization of its destiny as becoming one reuniting with the source.

Contzen writes that if we see the sculpture’ single holes as communities or cities, then the sculpture represents the whole planet as a fusion of all those. He states that we can go further and see the single holes as planets and the sculpture as our Galaxy, or the single holes as galaxies and the sculpture represents the whole universe, where size doesn’t matter. According to Contzen, the smallest parts are the ones that build up and support the whole, the totality – every grain of sand counts.

The reflection of the sculpture on the water should underline the fact that the city is not able to watch itself without using a mirror. The mirror of the city is composed by all of its past and present habitants, which allows - all together - to make the whole potential, beauty and light of Changsha visible. Contzen uses the transparency of the dense stone, and the fact that the light is able to penetrate and cross through the stone, as a metaphor for the superiority of spirit above matter. Every single human on this planet is working to increase the amount and the quality of light, to reflect and to worship the source of creation, the artist states. (Note that the original idea of placing the sculpture on the water was changed due to unfavourable river conditions).

Besides the Planet Series, and the artist’s more older works, Contzen creates abstract sculptures made out of different types of stone and bronze. In these series, one can especially see the influence of Moore, Ernst and Arp. The artist incorporates unique intuitive forms in separate parts that are merging into a fusion with each other. These sculptures come in different sizes – ranging from 20cm and up to 2 metres.

The artist’s works are part of numerous private and public collections worldwide located in the USA, Germany, France, Luxembourg, Portugal, Sweden, Spain, Brazil, Belgium, Canada, England, China, Switzerland and India.

In 2009, Contzen founded The Sculpture Factory, a multipurpose centre, serving as a workshop and an art gallery, located in Sintra, Portugal, of which he takes the position of the artistic director.

he Marble: The quarry in the Alentejo with which MATTHIAS CONTZEN works is called SOLUBEMA (Sociedade Luso Belga de Mamores).

It is the largest and one of the oldest quarries in Portugal. Already in the times of the Roman Empire marble was quarried there.

The quality of VIGARIA MARBLE is exceptionally fine-grained and translucent and is considered one of the best in the world, more valuable than Carrara marble. VIGARIA MARMOR is therefore preferred as a raw material by world famous architects and artists such as Amish Kapoor and Jeff Koons.

The founder, owner and operator is the Kesirian family of Armenian origin.

The marble block for the BIG BANG Project weighs approximately 45 tons. The block, measuring 2.60 x 2.60 x 2.60 m, is the largest block ever extracted in one piece from the quarry.

The mechanical preparation work is carried out by ETMA (Empresa Transformator de Marmors do Alentejo). It is also owned by the Kesiran family and has decades of experience and best reputation.