“Noi siamo polvere di stelle”: abbiamo percorso miliardi di anni come materia dell’universo insieme a materia che è diventata altro da noi.
Questo percorso tracciato da Jiménez Deredia è rimasto come memoria ancestrale creando un’empatia con il cosmo, una relazione diretta con la natura che è una natura naturans e trova nella trasmutazione il significato profondo dell’esistenza Il tema di questa mostra fiorentina in cui vengono esposte per la prima volta sculture di Jiménez Deredia si sviluppa attraverso le varie rappresentazioni della Genesi, tema da me scelto come filo conduttore per visualizzare lo stretto rapporto che intercorre fra i marmi e i bronzi di Deredia con il mondo delle piante che caratterizza il giardino, mondo metamorfico per eccellenza in cui si compie ciclicamente il processo della trasmutazione, quel divenire continuo della materia, caparbio e incessante nei suoi ritmi di vita e di morte, che trattiene in sé il passato ma schiude i germogli per l’avvenire.


I met Jiménez Deredia for the first time in summer 2000. I did not meet him personally in that occasion, but its gigantic white marble work which is as big as Michelangelo’s David. I was a guest at the famous Nicoli atelier, a wonderful workshop from which, for four generations, a dynasty of extraordinarily cultured and versatile talented craftsmen has been converting the models of international sculpture into their intended dimensions.
I found out that that statue represented Marcellino Champagnat, a saint with French origin completely unknown to me who founded the Institute of Fratelli Maristi for Christian Schools . I also found out that it was a work by Jiménez Deredia, a Costa Rican artist residing in Molicciara, a small town nearby Carrara . I remember I was struck by the singularity of the composition: simple, essential governed by strict proportional relations and at the same time seduced by the circularity almost sphericity of the shapes. The statue – they told me – was destined to one of the external niches of Saint Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican . The niches were traditionally built to house images of founders of religious orders.
In the next years, I have had the opportunity to look at Jimenez Deredia’s statue again representing Saint Marcellino Champagnat in Saint Peter’s Basilica. The statue is located in one of the niches designed by Michelangelo. At that time, however, I had already seen other works of the Costa Rican sculptor. This, finally, made his intellectual and emotional journey clear to me.
Pierre Restany has defined Deredia, the sculptor, as an adventurer (or alchemist) of the “heart and the reason”. The definition is appropriate and effective because it captures the exact meaning of a journey of art. A journey which has seen – balancing, comparing and mirroring each other – nostalgia and memories to play along with rational order.
Let’s consider the story of the man and of the artist. In the beginning, it was Costa Rica and its pre-Columbus Boruca spheres which are the emblems of an ancient civilization dating back to 4000 years ago. Then comes the docking with shining Carrara and its marble quarries. In the middle there is the faculty of architecture of Florence University and therefore Arnolfo and Brunelleschi, Michelozzo and Alberti as well as Michelucci, Ricci and Savioli. Today, for Dereida –in his fifties and at the peak of his life and career – the small town of Molicciara, located between sea and marble, is the anchor, the centre of the world, the workshop where ideas are extracted and memories are exalted.
It is possible to arrive in Carrara from all parts of the world because the marble is an irresistible magnet. The marble loved by Giovanni Pisano and Michelagelo is a myth before being a medium. Actually, it is the Myth. And because it is the Myth that transforms emotions and drives of every single individual into eternal archetypes, foreign sculptors who have chosen to become Tuscans, look into Carrara ’s marble as they are looking into a mirror. They recognize and pinpoint their culture of origin and (if they are good and they are helped by that sudden logical intuition that others call “talent”) they exalt and make absolute that original cultural heritage in comparison and in synthesis with other cultural suggestions. The result will be the harmonious and definite proposal, the identifying sign which characterizes the artist, the unmistakable authoritative mark that can only be defined by the word “style”.
Jiménez Derida has lived, has governed and has succeeded in this type of experience. He has done so by playing around with the resources of the heart and of the reason as well as with clear sagacity – as Restany would say.
As a Latin American foreigner, he bore in mind and in his heart the archetypes of pre-colonial civilizations. The granite spheres that the Boruca Indians mysteriously scattered on Costa Rica ’s rain forests were closed shapes, silent presences carrying indecipherable messages. However, those archaic objects contained the idea of the Absolute. There was the metaphysic immanence, there was the obscure thought of God as in the black stone of Kubrick’s famous film.
In Dereida’s sculptures that obscure impression and that deep imprinting have remained and in Tuscany they have been able to sprout as seeds rich in fruits. The intense idea of the holy sphere can be even seen in the overlapping and tendentially circular iconographic complements of Saint Marcelino Champagnat. I mean that we find the idea of the sphere in the children (one seating next to his feet and the other carried on his shoulders) who are the symbol of the Saint’s mission in the Vatican basilica. This is why I have been able to go back over the education and the intense choices of the artist from that sculpture.
The new homeland – Tuscany , Carrara and Florence – has taught Dereida the proportions of dimension, order and precision. Under Tuscany ’s sky, the Costa Rican sculptor has understood that the visible truth is stimulated by ideas which are expressed through proportional relations within the melodious rhythm of life. So this is how the comparison-mirroring between “heart” and “brain” is solved and successfully subsided.
His even and intact bronzes and marbles (closed and self-sufficient as a thing of nature, as a leaf, as a shell, as a stone) insist on an absolute approach. His works stimulate peremptory questions and foresee definite answers because, even when questions appear multivalent and omnipresent as the judgements of mystery books, they are for everyone and anyone.
In this way, Jiménez Deredia’s sculptures make you think at ideograms and totem. His sculptures have the holiness of the latter and they share the complexity and ambiguity of the former.
Pierre Restany has defined certain recent Dereida’s works as “ Cosmic images ” because they mime, even when they represent human shapes, the simplicity and the circularity of the finished shapes. The sphere is the shape of the world which is eternal because it is circular and circular are Deredia’s women, flowers and overlapping bronze spheres. His sculptures are perfect and finished works under the sky as the mysterious stone monuments of the Boruca Indians were four thousand years ago. Although those works are packed within the Tuscan intellectual order, it illuminates them with proportion and reason.


Antonio Paolucci
Soprintendente per il Polo Museale Fiorentino