The loftily perched heads of Femmes de Venise [Women from Venice] say a lot about the inaccessibility of describing a reality apparent throughout Alberto Giacometti's life. These heads·hopelessly, increasingly elusive, tiny in relation to the elongated, emaciated body, with only a seemingly fragile structure anchored in the ground·reveal the essential part of existence.

Giacometti's L'homme qui marche [The walking man] in and of itself symbolizes the very nature of this century; it expresses all the difficulty of being, the complexity and unicity of life, the strange and almost impossible task of encountering the Other, the solitude that inhabits this ending millennium, but it also expresses (in this space that borders on nothingness) the dignity of a man facing himself, walking toward a new destiny, standing, facing hope.

To erect a sculpture meant something with Giacometti, who followed a very logical guiding line starting with the Surrealist period. From this time on, he envisaged idols who seemed the product of a foreign land, foreign to his own culture, and he evoked sacred offerings to the unknown. He fixed his attention on the absolute, in endless respect for other lives, other civilizations, other forms of culture, which, in being so different from reality, could only be compared to a dream.

What to others would appear a source of incomprehension was for him an indispensable, primordial stage of reflection on the sculpture. Marked by other influences, Giacometti represented works, caused them to exist, through reflection and thought that from now on took on the imagination and strength of the material. But how can such reflection be conducted, while ceaselessly fleeing reality? How can slow digressions, repetitions over the years, be avoided?

In the thirties, the sculptor controlled space and organic forms through wit alone, constraints that conveyed unreality but led necessarily to another finality.

Soon, Giacometti would again take up the ineluctable study of a face, an abandoned reality, an endless questioning of himself. A new oeuvre emerged, at the limit of the visible; worked to infinity, it was split, trembling, in order to define new contours, the memory of a material which in turn could undergo every possible torment. It brushed up against erasure. It was a passionate, vibrant oeuvre situated at the bounds of sculpture. It expressed moments of extreme [uncertainty] when everything might disappear. It always pointed to possible rupture. In his ardent search to discover another world, the sculptor excavated the likeness and truth of the Other in the quest for his essence.

In his reconstructing and restructuring, Giacometti clearly sought to build a world on the verge of dissolving, but on the way to resurrection. Yet nothing speaks of memory and the past in this desperate attempt to express the present. The dignity of a gesture, the dignity of man·everything points to resurgence, remarkable and fatal human presence, perpetual continuity. The artist no longer exists; it is the man, as an entity, who erects and sculpts the urgency of his troubling presence. This is the ultimate message, no doubt similar to that of the first men who did not know how to express their enigmatic existence but did so definitively when they drew traces of their passage, in exemplary representation, not aware it would become eternal. Giacometti transmuted [eternity] in space with the emerging human presence in an oeuvre whose life he would strive to capture. In these intense periods, he went from the representation of the model to the representation of a man, intuitively and possibly resembling a double, a more definitive constant where everything was identified and reconstructed in the unitary search for being, a primitive but imperative sign, revealing his thought. The hope for a new work.