Hedayat Reda “Is it real? How? Did you paint it?”
Observing and absorbing art is a pleasure we often take for granted. That we are surrounded by beauty, and that the existence of more beauty in the world can be so intentional and instinctual, that there are always more artists creating, reinterpreting, giving our imagination new rooms to play, is a blessing, not to be taken lightly. But the work of an artist, or, I should say, a truly great artist, is in permanence. It is to create something so magnificent you can picture it transcending time and space. Alex Proba, working with the luxury lifestyle brand SolidNature, has achieved exactly that with her transcendent and brilliant piece Echoes of the Infinite for this year’s Art D’Égypte: Forever is Now.
Over 20 tons of solid stone stands proudly at the foot of the Egyptian pyramids, begging to be admired. The installation, made up of three separate parts that function as a whole, showcases a rainbow of earthen colours, held together by steel, expert engineering, and dreams.
“The work is built around the idea of emergence, with forms that feel as if they have grown out of the desert rather than being placed on top of it. The three sculptures mirror the three pyramids, creating a quiet rhythm across the landscape. These forms are not designed as strict symbols. They are intuitive shapes that can hold many readings at once. They reflect transformation, connection, and the passage of time,” Alex writes to me from the nest of new motherhood, unable to physically make it to the exhibition, but sending her positive and expository thoughts from afar.
The “Eye of Horus”, the “portal to the past”, and the “anchor”, make up vivid and solid shapes constructed out of onyx, travertine, marble, quartzite and sodalite, natural stones sourced from SolidNature’s catalogue of 600+ varieties from across the globe. Together, they blend shades of jade, royal blue, ivory, terracotta, sandy yellow, burgundy, and burnt orange, with delicate paler veins, often white or grey, running throughout them.The effect is that of an extract out of a mountain, a piece of nature that stands before you, smooth but knowing. Defiant and strong. This stone speaks. This stone is ancient. This stone has witnessed things.
“A lot of these cracks are earthquakes,” David Mahyari, Founder and CEO of SolidNature explains of the little lines that form and run all across the different stones. In a tête à tête over coffee and pastries, he recounts how stone has all been formed millions of years ago. That, the difference between the pyramids– which stand in the backdrop to Echoes of the Infinite– and his art collaboration with Alex, is when it was shaped. When we humans “got our hands on it”, so to speak. And accordingly, how it manifests.
“With this design we were fighting against gravity,” David grounds me in the obstacles associated with working with this material “The biggest challenge was to convince everybody that it’s doable.”. He outlines how his team of over 20 people, plus in-house and external engineers, were lightly in panic when he decided to take this project on. But David is a self-proclaimed “yes” man, taking on every project with a smile and a cheerful energy, not stopping for things like the size of the stone, the curvature of the design, or the variety of shapes involved in the constellation. Having worked with stone for over a decade, David was nervous, but confident that it could work.
From him, I understand that the three solid pieces that make up the sculpture are actually sort of “screwed” together. Underneath the sand there is a steel structure that runs through every part of rock. “There’s a solid piece of rock and we cut it and pierce it into two,” he draws a small diagram in my notebook. It looks like train tracks running in an oval shape then coming together at the bottom in a tablet-like map (the part that is buried in sand). “The trick was, how can we use the smaller pieces available in quarries or at factories in a sustainable and durable manner. Also, if you look at the red travertine in the Eye of Horus, we looked at how we can maximize the use of the rock we are using. If it needs to come back in the other sculptures, let it come back in the other sculptures.”
The feat is difficult, but appears to us as a seamless merger. Gazed upon, Echoes of the Infinite reads as one piece, that curves and moves like the elements, that changes as the light hits it at specific points in different parts of the day, that reflects both the moment it is in and the moments that make it up.
“My research focused on the emotional and symbolic foundations of Egyptian visual culture. I studied ideas such as protection, renewal, cycles of the sun, and the relationship between earthly life and the spiritual world. I was not interested in literal motifs. Instead I wanted to understand the deeper meaning behind them in order to create a contemporary response that felt respectful and intuitive,” Alex writes, digging into the material and its purpose. This work, like all her work, is fluid and moving.
“The pyramids influenced the work through their scale, presence, and geometry. They hold a type of permanence that dissolves ego. Rather than competing with them, I wanted the sculptures to feel like they belonged together – visually intertwined,” Alex illustrates more of her creative process to me.
From Alex’s e-mails and David’s strong narrative, it becomes clear to me that in a project such as this, the material itself led the way.
“My creative process begins with intuition. I sketch by hand until the shapes start to feel alive. I often move quickly at the beginning so that the first marks are emotional and not overthought. From there the forms develop through many iterations. Once I understand the emotional direction, I move into digital modeling to refine the scale and composition. For this project, the stone itself became an essential part of the process. Together with SolidNature we selected materials whose natural veining and color already contained movement. The vision came together through a balance of intuition and material logic. The stone led as much as I did but sometimes even more.”
David echoes Alex, expounding more on how machines were used to carve the material, how they went through several colour iterations, how sizing was adjusted repeatedly the more they worked on the piece.
“It is all very humbling, working with a natural product.The material itself is so humbling. Also, the piece just gives a happy vibe. Like all of Alex’s work, it is happy,” David tells me how working on this sculpture affected him.
I cannot agree more. I don’t know whether it is the playfulness of the forms, or the sunny pale shades, something about the work is enchanting, and makes you want to go back to it again and again– see it up close, see it from a different angle.
Expounding on the concept of history associated with the work and its meaning to him, David shares his personal philosophy of time, vis-a-vis Forever is Now.
“You need to understand the past, to understand the now, to predict the future. It is always about patterns that come back. Circles.”
“What does this piece mean to you?” I ask David curious about his personal interpretation. “And after the pyramids, what’s next?”
“The moon,” he jokes and then reflects seriously on my original question:
“Possibility. No matter how hard something appears it is possible. There are always boundaries to be pushed.”
For Alex the piece is a meeting point between ancient symbolism and the contemporary language she has built over the years, but her next project is definitely focusing on her little one.
“Motherhood is definitely my biggest project at the moment, it’s been the most beautiful (and wildly unpredictable) creative shift. And I’m looking forward to be making art with her and collaborating on some art together. She’ll probably beat me in terms of creativity.”
We look forward to seeing more groundbreaking work from these two visionaries.
Echoes of the Infinite can be viewed at the Pyramids of Giza until December 7th.
