Clay, Fire and the Sea
Sixty years of a single quest: giving a body to Phoenician memory.
Bronze is his memory. Steel, his dignity. And silence, his most honest tongue.
Beirut, 1944. The child and the sea
Antoine Berberi is born facing the Mediterranean, on the shore that invented the alphabet and the first sails. As a child in Beirut, he learns that the sea is not a border: it is a path.
The path of Bou Saydoun, first sailor of the legends. That of Elissa, princess of Tyre who became queen of Carthage. These tales, he will carry them all his life, until he gives them a body, a patina, a weight in the hands.
Paris. The trial by fire
He is twenty when the doors of the Beaux-Arts open for him in Paris, in the studio of Hubert Yencesse. Far from his sea, he discovers another homeland: that of the true gesture.
There Les Esprits I is born, a work cast with his own hands. There, too, the pact of a lifetime is sealed: to keep the material under his own hand, from the first day to the last. The modelling, the wax, the pour, the patina: all of it will be born of his gestures.
The hand and the material
Fire becomes his home. A trade that few hands, in the world, still practise whole, and of which he alone remains master, from sketch to finished bronze. Picture him there, in the heat of the fire, watching for the instant when bronze embraces the void left by the wax. His alloy bears the name of a dusk: the old gold.
His patinas borrow their colours from landscapes, Florentine green, reddish caramel, bark brown. Under light, this old gold carries an inner glow, almost secret. When bronze falls silent, steel takes up the word. On every notice returns the same phrase, like an oath: cast by the artist. Three words that say everything: for him, to shape matter is a way of loving.
'I am not a static sculptor. That is precisely why I work neither stone nor marble.'
Antoine Berberi, L'Orient-Le Jour, 2003
The Phoenician compass
Phoenicia is, for him, a mother tongue, not an antiquarian backdrop. Each silhouette seems carved from within, as though the legend had taken on flesh under his hand. Elissa rises for the entrance of Tyre, honoured as early as 1970. The winged disk of Alphabetael brings the letters into bloom.
The trireme of the First Sailor, that 'Tradfat' christened by the poet Saïd Akl, swells its sails of bronze. Berythe, Damo, Mirdia: recovered names, returned to the world like light to buried faces. Work after work, the same gesture begins again: to set sail, to hand down, to be reborn.
'I am interested in human life on its spiritual side and on its narrative side,' he would one day confide. Story and breath, history and soul: that, perhaps, is his true rarity, even more than his material. Deeply attached to his country, he has made of it a universal language. Courage, freedom, at times exile: always with that reserve of great artists, who suggest more than they impose.
Sculpting Lebanon
His country, he has sculpted it in its glory as in its wounds. His art was born from the chaos of a civil war he would say he suffered enormously through. Since then, he chooses to raise memory rather than watch it fade: the statue of President Bechara El-Khoury keeps watch over Beirut, while the memorials of Ghazir and Chartoun hold the names of the departed.
Already in the midst of war, The Plea for Peace had risen like a prayer of steel. Then came Revolution, finished weeks before August 4, 2020, and the Blast masks, faces of dread cast in bronze. Above it all, a dream still to be fulfilled: The Cedar of Liberty, a fountain at its base, as a symbol of life.
Each monument stays rooted in its native ground. But his name travels. Decade after decade, he is discovered further afield, until the whole world comes looking for his bronzes.
The world as horizon
His works have crossed the seas, like the sails of his Phoenician ancestors. Four continents welcome them. The course has stayed the same since the first day: to make of Lebanon a living promise.
Past eighty, in the studio of Klayaat, the casting goes on. The fire, still, stays alive.
Sculpture, for Antoine Berberi, is a breath before it is an object: a silent encounter where matter becomes emotion, where the gaze of the creator meets that of the visitor.
Today, in his studio, Antoine Berberi continues to sculpt. Every new work carries the same conviction, dear to the great masters: true art is felt before it is seen, it inhabits memory and leaves, in the present as in the future, the quiet and profound imprint of beauty.