paris: returning to the first spark
returning to paris this year for the art3f fair — quietly showing three of my sculptures — felt less like an achievement and more like a return. a pause in the city where my search for meaning once began.
the first visit
when i first came to paris as a young man, i was carrying the loss of my brother. that rupture opened a long, quiet search for orientation. i didn’t come to paris as an aspiring artist. i came as someone trying to understand the tension between my inner world and the outer one.
in the rodin museum, the thinker struck me deeply. not because of its fame, but because it mirrored exactly what i was living: a body holding an inner weight. rodin’s surfaces — rough, alive, unresolved — showed me that form can carry emotion without explaining it.
later, impressionism taught me something different: that reality is not fixed, but shifts entirely with perception. light changes everything. perspective changes everything. i didn’t know it then, but these ideas would become the foundation of my artistic language.
a seed of thought: the red sphere
walking through the champ de mars park, i found the monument for human rights. its clarity, its insistence on human value, touched me quietly. today, i see how deeply this moment lives in my work — especially in the red sphere that appears again and again. a small impulse. a seed of thought. a reminder of dignity and inner movement.
decades passed
i worked, experimented, shifted from early figurative attempts toward distilled geometric clarity. and then, unexpectedly, i returned to paris — not as a visitor, but standing next to three of my own sculptures. not as a “successful artist,” but simply as a human being who had followed a long, quiet thread from inner tension to outer form.
giacometti and the opposite direction
at the giacometti institute, i was reminded of his early cubist phase — his destruction of the figure to reach psychological essence. my path moved in the opposite direction: from figurative beginnings toward geometric reduction. giacometti broke the body apart to find truth; i distill geometry to reveal presence. two different trajectories, one shared question:
what remains when everything unnecessary is removed?
unconcerned, but not indifferent
this time, i also walked through montparnasse cemetery — a quiet place where artists and thinkers rest. at man ray’s grave, i paused at his epitaph:
“unconcerned, but not indifferent.”
a sentence that captures a way of being i deeply relate to — staying free from expectations, yet fully present to the inner movements that shape a life and a work. i have lived this tension myself, and i still struggle with it at times. perhaps that ongoing effort — to remain open without being overwhelmed — is the true essence of man ray’s statement.
connecting past and present
my artistic language today lies deeply in those early impressions — rodin’s inner weight, impressionism’s shifting perception, giacometti’s search for essence, man ray’s clarity, and the human values embodied in that monument in the park. paris was the beginning. returning to paris with my own work was another pause — a moment to connect past and present, and to keep moving.
and perhaps the real question is not about my red sphere, but about yours:
what is the small red sphere in your own story — the quiet impulse that keeps you moving through your inner and outer world, just as my sculptures begin their purpose in your space, nudging reflection day by day once my work is done.
impressions from art3f paris
art becomes art in dialogue. a few moments with sculpture creative continuum at the booth of galerie helligkeit.
the works shown at art3f paris
- sculpture creative continuum — friction, focus, and the flow between
- sculpture sphere of life — centering the inner worlds of mind, soul, and heart
- sculpture find your sweetspot — balance, focus, and the space where you do your best work
four museums for sculpture lovers in paris
- musée rodin — the place to dive deep into the oeuvre of auguste rodin. a beautiful house and garden, and rarely crowded.
- musée du louvre — the largest art museum in the world. a must-visit, even though it is often overcrowded.
- institut giacometti — a small museum run by the fondation giacometti, if you want to learn more about giacometti’s life and oeuvre.
- musée bourdelle — a small, centrally located museum dedicated to antoine bourdelle, with insights into the craft of sculpture.
