A primordial Dive
“We opened a painted tomb, but it was strange, not like the other Lucanians we’re used to; this one is different, there is a painted diver”. On Monday, June 3, 1968, just after one o’clock in the afternoon, the sun was beating down on the fields surrounding the temples of Paestum, when an extraordinary discovery took place by archeologist Mario Napoli. The small Salernitan town with ruins shrouded by rose bushes had unexpectedly become a cradle of Modern art after its discovery by Johann Joachim Winckelmann. He returned to the site multiple times, followed by others, including Goethe, Hubert and Vanvitelli, transforming it into a new Grand Tour destination. Past and present merged in that mysterious sight. It was not a common sequence of events. On that warm June day, in the Greek city, which would later be dedicated to the God of the sea by the Romans, five travertine slabs bonded with plaster re-emerged, one with the image of a man diving from a springboard. It is a harmonic composition, which includes all the elements—tamarisk-like plants behind and in front of the diver and a springboard, made of a series of stone blocks. The scene is sketched with basic strokes, with the exception of the male figure in freefall and the tree trunks, which are painted red. For Carole A. Feuerman, sculpture has the same effect as Proust’s madeleine: it is a direct link to personal memories, but also a continuous pursuit of mimesis and an approach to reality that the memory helps make current: “Swimming has always made me feel closer to eternity,” says the artist. The same eternity is represented by the slab from Paestum. The Diver, the only example of a surviving intact box tomb, was painted half a century before Christ. The American sculptor’s figures propelling towards the water carry with them the same mystery of classical antiquity. The ancient Diver is a prototypical figure suspended between an aerial world and one made of the primordial liquid that returns in art throughout the ages, and the same characteristics are present in Feuerman’s pursuit of verisimilitude. Unlike the more realistic bodies indulging in wine depicted on the other slabs of the ancient tomb, the lone man who enters the water like a projectile is viewed from a more distant point of observation—he seems to belong to the realm between sleep and wakefulness, a semi-unconscious or near-death state. The Golden Mean, or “in medio stat virtus” for the ancients, is the title of Carole Feuerman’s version of the diver—one of her most classically-inspired works. Here, too, the figure suspended in the air is in pursuit of an equilibrium that can only be imparted on the body by water, with its constant, natural and physical push, which allows it to resurface after the fall. A rigorous application of the rules of self-discipline makes Feuerman’s divers nearly perfect, their bodies like letters of the alphabet—perfect Cs or Ss with their gravity-assisted plunges. The moment just before the entry into water from great heights is expressed in The Double Diver from 2014, which features two divers. The Diver is a bronze sculpture from the same year. The model is actor Richie Nuzzolese, whose cast was made from silicone. But, unlike her sculptures of female swimmers, Carole did not paint her divers, leaving the material to speak for itself, and creating contrasts in order to depict reflections. Just as the discovery of the ancient Diver caused a sense of displacement, Feuerman’s diver offers a glimpse between two worlds that are only seemingly distant in time, creating a short circuit in which the imitation of the represented subject gives rise to a work that is open to myriad interpretations. This simulation and/or reproduction of the body in motion, albeit realized centuries later, provokes in the viewer that same dreamy disorientation that, like few other representations of reality, transports us elsewhere.