All language subtitles for Gonzalo.Fonseca.Membra.Disjecta.and.A.Life.in.Stone.2019.1080p.WEBRip.x264-RARBG.eng

NARRATOR:
Much can be made
out of scattered fragments.

From time to time,
discarded rubble

can reveal lost histories.

[♪]

For the better part
of the 20th century,

the artist Gonzalo Fonseca

worked in solitude
and relative obscurity.

Traces of Fonseca
remain inscribed in his works,

which are spread
across the globe,

hidden in corners,
concealed in memory.

There's an obscure term

sometimes used in archeology,
"disjecta membra."

It refers to the method
of reassembling a text

or an artifact by piecing
together its broken shards,

trying to assemble a whole

trying to assemble a whole
by collecting
its scattered fragments.

by collecting
its scattered fragments.

It calls back
to the Egyptian myth of Osiris,

the murdered king
whose dismembered body

is reassembled by his wife,
the goddess Isis.

The term endures as a poetic
expression of fragments

pieced together anew
to tell the story of a whole.

To understand Gonzalo Fonseca
and his artwork,

one must collect and attempt
to reassemble what remains,

beginning with the stones
he left behind.

[♪]

[♪]

History and the ages
ran through him.

Fonseca climbed
the great pyramids.

He traced words
to their murky roots.

He knew ancient histories
as though

he witnessed them himself.

Fonseca was a man
of deep learning

and insatiable curiosity.

He was a conduit to the past,

to its myths, its lives,
its traces,

but particularly to its forms.

Gonzalo Fonseca spent his life

rendering a playfully
atavistic vision into stone.

To re-discover Fonseca
is to uncover deeper truths

and wisdom gathered
from the distant past.

Reassembling Fonseca
is a journey

toward understanding
the very meaning of stone.

[♪]

[♪]

MAN 1:
All the things I know
about Gonzalo's past,

I know from his family.

Gonzalo wouldn't let you know
even where he was from.

He was not easy to--
I mean, he was reclusive.

And people really
had to make this journey to him

and talk him into letting them
come into his space.

WOMAN 1:
Vim and vigor,
full of life, cheerful,

endlessly interested in people,
in human beings, in origin.

MAN 2:
Let's just say that he had
very little patience

for stupid
or non-thinking people.

WOMAN 2:
Fascinating. I think we were
all in love with Gonzalo.

WOMAN 2:
Fantastic sense of humor.

I mean, this was a man
who always made fun.

WOMAN 3:
Always fascinating
because he would always come

with an idea
that you would never expect.

That's why I say
he was a true original.

MAN 5:
There's not many artists
I would think of

as being timeless,
and Gonzalo certainly is.

WOMAN 3:
I think that
there is something

that propelled him
to create his own--

His own antiquity,
or his own culture,

or his own civilization
in stone.

STEINER:
Once you get in touch
with someone like this,

who has this kind of knowledge,
you really take advantage

because that will
make a difference in your life.

Gonzalo was not depending
on exhibitions,

gallerists,
and all that theater.

He was just not depending
into it, and this was a choice.

I saw people coming,
giving him a check.

Writing here,
"I give you 50,000 for this."

And he said,
"Get the fuck out of here."

He didn't say this,
but that was the message.

He said, "Just go, please go."

He could even get angry
in that moment.

I was 20 years old,
you look at this and you feel:

"Wow, this is a statement."

The person's not rich
or something--

He doesn't need it
or whatever.

It's like-- It's a statement.

It's something
which is like, "Why?"

Standing for something else.

And Gonzalo stood for something
else, for me, in so many ways.

NARRATOR:
Gonzalo Fonseca
hid in plain sight.

Born in Montevideo,
Uruguay, in 1922,

he spent the majority of his
adult life in New York City.

Gonzalo lived through
and made art

in the swelter
of the 20th century.

He resided on the same block
as Andy Warhol

and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Yet he was far from that world.

NARRATOR:
One could hardly consider
Gonzalo part of any era,

any scene or movement.

Gonzalo's work directed him
toward the deep past

and often alienated him
from the present.

His tricky relationship
to time

left him in a world
of his own device.

[♪]

Gonzalo's body and mind
occupied separate spaces.

From his loft, Gonzalo's thoughts
may have been caught up

in an ancient Latin
grammatical riddle,

or a 5000-year-old Egyptian
plumbing technique,

or a 17th Century
architectural quandary.

Yet, Fonseca's training
and practice

were rooted in
20th-century modernism.

Gonzalo fluently drew from

an intimate engagement
with history and myth.

In conversation, he mixed
the many languages he spoke.

He held entire museum
collections at his fingertips,

citing them piece by piece.

NARRATOR:
Gonzalo was hungry
to know the world,

but less than eager
to be known by it.

Okay.

They didn't even meet yet,
Mama and Papa.
'55.

NARRATOR:
Instead, Gonzalo preferred

to reveal himself
through his work.

A jumble of clues that point to
his varied preoccupations

and obsessions.

[♪]

[♪]

NARRATOR:
Gonzalo's loft was
a world apart from the city.

In its rooms,
it could be any century.

He hand-built his living spaces
like sculpture,

and sculptures divided rooms.

Dust from chiseled stone
blanketed every surface.

Thousands of books piled high

lined the walls,
with titles like:

The Plundered Past,
The Survival of Pagan Gods,

A Mayan Grammar,
Homeric Greek for Beginners,

Diary of a Seducer,
Discourses of the Buddha,

A Platonic Labyrinth,

Artists of the Tundra
and the Sea.

Gonzalo read voraciously,

alternating between book
and chisel,

finding in an obscure passage,
a clue.

The ignition to some new form,

the motivation
for a play of shape.

Gonzalo made no distinction
between work and life.

His sculptures
were not product,

but process, a way of existing

between hand and mind,
materiality and imagination.

Behind a hidden door
adjacent to his bedroom

was a secret chamber.

Gonzalo called it
the "Sancto Sanctorum."

[♪]

An encyclopedia of civilization
and its traces,

spanning thousands of years,

originating from every corner
of the globe.

From floor to ceiling,

Gonzalo arranged
hundreds of artifacts:

Mycenaean and Maasai,

Egyptian and Cycladic,
Inuit and Aboriginal,

Incan and Han.

Each object
gestured to a world.

They stood for a deep
and elusive realm

of myths, dreams, rites,

entire systems of thought,
and practices of being.

[♪]

These objects carried a spirit

that Gonzalo replicated
in his own work.

These artifacts were signs

of a universal vocabulary
of humanity

from which Gonzalo
drew his own artistic language.

That artistic language
was hard-won

and not easily mastered.

It took Gonzalo
over half of his life

to discover his voice
in stone.

His was a language
with an ancient grammar

and revolutionary
conjugations.

To find his voice,

Gonzalo stepped
outside of himself,

journeying as far as he could,
reaching back through time.

It all started in Venice,
on the Grand Canal

when 11-year-old Gonzalo
declared to his family

that he would become
an artist.

His sense of myth
already evident,

it was in 1933 on a six-month
trip to Europe with family

that Gonzalo
felt the true weight of art

and the magnitude of history.

[♪]

For another boy,
this artistic impulse

might have been
a childish whim.

But Gonzalo returned home

to Montevideo, Uruguay,
with a mission.

Right away, he transformed
his family's basement

into a studio
and began to work.

In a family of vibrant
intellects and inventors,

Gonzalo stood out.

He was the rebellious artist.

Coming of age in Montevideo
in the 1940s,

Gonzalo's mind roved widely,

far beyond the limits
of his time and place.

At his Jesuit high school,

Gonzalo wrote a lengthy
dissertation renouncing God.

At 17,
Gonzalo encountered a man

who would shape
his artistic destiny,

the firebrand modernist artist,
Joaquin Torres-Garcia.

Torres-Garcia was already one

of the most influential artists
of his generation.

Originally from Uruguay,
he worked, experimented,

and exhibited with some of
Europe's leading avant-gardes:

Theo van Doesburg,
Piet Mondrian,

Hans Arp, Pablo Picasso,
Joan Miro.

Back in Uruguay, Torres-Garcia
pursued an original

and all-encompassing
language of art

based on elemental forms,
signs and figures.

The goal was to use art
to create, in his words:

"An abstract logic
to the world."

Torres-Garcia called this

new artistic order
Universal Constructivism.

Sleepy Montevideo became the
epicenter of a new movement.

Gonzalo dropped his pursuit

of a university degree
in architecture to jump aboard.

Gonzalo's father viewed
Torres-Garcia as a radical,

an agitator who could be
a dangerous influence.

As Gonzalo rejected

the bourgeois expectations
of his family

in favor of his apprenticeship
with Torres-Garcia,

the relationship
between father and son frayed.

The growing tension erupted.

At a nightly family dinner,

Gonzalo's father
mocked Torres-Garcia.

The 18-year-old Gonzalo
stood up

from the dining table
and walked out the door.

He did not speak to his father
for the next 10 years.

Gonzalo forged
his independence

by moving into an abandoned
tower in a nearby park,

making the decrepit space
his own.

It became the first
of many reclaimed

and improvised studios.

From these primitive heights,

Gonzalo committed himself
to a new

and explorative
practice of art.

[♪]

The Taller Torres-Garcia
was a laboratory

in which a group of young
artists experimented

with a new formal vocabulary
under the dogmatic leadership

of Joaquin Torres-Garcia.

One of the first students
of the Taller,

Gonzalo was an active, though
sometimes enigmatic, presence.

He prized the instruction
of Torres-Garcia

and took naturally
to the geometric possibilities

of the Taller's methods.

The use of pre-modern signs
and pre-Columbian symbols

defined the Taller style.

Yet increasingly,
Gonzalo felt constricted

by the limits
of the artistic language

prescribed by Torres-Garcia.

He wanted to go deeper

and get to the core
of the mysteries

and meaning behind the forms.

The death of Torres-Garcia
in 1949 uprooted Gonzalo.

There was nothing
left for him in Uruguay.

With no master to follow,
already proficient

within the creative boundaries
of Montevideo,

Gonzalo set out
to track down the spirit

that animated
his artistic impulses.

In 1950, in the dark of night,

with little more
than the clothes on his back,

Gonzalo boarded a cargo ship

named the Tacoma
bound for Europe.

Uruguay receded
into the distance

as dreams of archaic glory,

distant gods, and mythic lands

carried the 28-year-old
across the Atlantic.

[♪]

Camera in hand,
documenting his travels

in photographs and sketches,

Gonzalo made his way
through a world

he had studied
and imagined for years.

As he moved through
Sicily and Greece,

impressions washed over him.

In harbors,
he sketched portraits

to pay his fare
to the next destination.

He sailed to Crete,

and on to Lebanon,
Syria, and Jordan.

He found work
on archeological digs.

He was brought to life
by the hints and mysteries

pulled up
from beneath the dirt.

He discovered
how inert material

took sacred form.

He saw Petra and Palmyra.

A new sense of scale
and proportion,

physical and temporal,
electrified Gonzalo.

He made his way south
to Egypt.

He traveled up the Nile,
crossed the Nubian Desert,

and made it to Khartoum
in Sudan.

Gonzalo contracted
a virus in his eyes

and nearly went blind.

A doctor noticed Gonzalo
sick in the streets

and nursed him back to health,

an intervention that saved
the eyesight

of this budding artist.

Gonzalo studied
and analyzed all he saw.

He scrutinized his reactions
and sensations.

He contrasted ancient cultures
with one another

and with the teaching
of Torres-Garcia.

From Dandarah, he described
a conversion of sorts:

"There was a tunnel
going down a stairway,

"very long
and lighted with candles.

"You could see figures
and more figures,

"suns, forms of all sorts.

"I had a sensation
close to the vertigo you feel

"when you are at a height

"and I suddenly thought that,

"as I was going down
and continued underground,

"I was entering
further inside that world.

"And that it wasn't art,

it was an initiation
to a certain knowledge."

He had entered another realm.

Inside of him, myth merged
with fresh observation,

antique forms
took modern shape.

Torres-Garcia's influence
receded

and Gonzalo's own spirit
began to find its form.

Gonzalo was transformed
by a new sense of scale,

that of a man
measured alongside

the immensity of history.

[♪]

Gonzalo landed in Paris.

He painted
on scraps of cardboard

and sketched
with salvaged coal.

He often went days
without eating.

He spent time
in Madrid and Rome,

painting
and practicing ceramics.

He exhibited work
wherever and however he could.

He chased down
archeological sites

with a vigorous curiosity.

His hands were always
at one craft or another.

He was in pursuit of a vision
just beginning to form.

In Uruguay,
Gonzalo had been a student.

But these years overseas
liberated Gonzalo.

Working in the shadows
of antiquity,

he tasted creative freedom.

[♪]

Plans to travel to Japan

were derailed one afternoon
at a café in Rome.

A lovely young American
took a seat

next to Gonzalo in a café.

She carried flowers
and wore a bright red dress.

"I'm also American,"
Gonzalo exclaimed:

"South American."

Her name was Elizabeth Kaplan,

and she was from New York.

Young,
beautiful, and precocious,

she had come to Rome to pursue
her work as a painter.

The two young artists
fell quickly in love.

Within a year,
the two married in Tangier.

Not incidentally, the couple's
union inspired Gonzalo

to reunite
with both of his parents

for the first time
since leaving home at 18.

The young couple
moved to Uruguay

and reconnected with Gonzalo's
old colleagues and family.

Gonzalo had grown.

He was not the same man

who had left Uruguay
six years prior.

Again, death pushed Gonzalo
from Uruguay.

His oldest brother, Rodolfo,

at 36, a brilliant lawyer,
wise beyond his years,

died unexpectedly
of a heart condition.

Grief and a sense

that more awaited them
beyond the horizon

that more awaited them
beyond the horizon
propelled Gonzalo
and Elizabeth north.

propelled Gonzalo
and Elizabeth north.

[♪]

It was the end of the 1950s,
and New York thrummed

with the energy
of the new world.

Within six years,
Elizabeth and Gonzalo

had four children,
Quina, Bruno, Caio, and Isabel.

He had an entirely new life
and a young, glowing family.

DE TORRES:
He arrived in New York.

He looked outside the window,

and you could see
all the windows open

and what people were doing
in their homes.

And he says,
"Everybody was painting."

[CHUCKLING]
So he says,
"Painting should be--

Should be forbidden under--
Under penalty of death."

"If you painted,
you risked death penalty."

So you had to be
so committed and so brave

to paint that you risk being,
you know, killed.

I mean,
those are incredible thoughts.

He always had these--

These ideas
that were very extreme,

very radical,
but incredibly original.

So that made him
so fascinating.

NARRATOR:
Beginning in the 1960s,

Gonzalo's work evolved
dramatically and rapidly.

In New York,
Gonzalo discovered,

as he put it,
"An orgy of materials."

Wood, plaster, clay, and cement
supplanted paint on canvas.

He played with texture

and experimented
with three-dimensional work.

It was no longer possible

to simply call Gonzalo
a painter.

His time in Europe,
the Middle East, and Africa

freed Gonzalo
from the constraints

of his early training.

New York freed Gonzalo
from tradition altogether.

[♪]

Gonzalo worked on commissions

for playgrounds
and public projects.

He found himself building
on an architectural scale.

He was moving very quickly.

The impulse to build
followed Gonzalo everywhere.

Even a family outing
to the beach

became creative territory,

a place to make dreamlands.

This period of time was marked

by joyful experimentation
and artistic growth.

But as an artist,
Gonzalo was seeking something

that eluded him
in playgrounds and sandcastles.

His eye for form
and sense of myth

was not yet satisfied.

His keen intellect,
ever roaming, needed more.

[♪]

Gonzalo's notebooks
evidence a vigorous mind

engrossed in study and play.

In them, he tested ideas
and sketched possibilities.

He mapped winds
and parsed words

to their deepest roots.

Inventions and riddles,

and the wisdom of thousands
of years jostle the pages.

Gonzalo's art conversed
with voices

that echoed through millennia.

By the end of the 1960s,

Gonzalo's interest
in discrete forms had given way

to the construction
of entire worlds.

His work, like his thinking,
was becoming monumental.

The themes and structures

that had taken hold
of Gonzalo's practice

required a medium
that could express

their anachronistic force

and their expanding dimension.

What Gonzalo needed was stone.

[♪]

It took a 200-million-year
metamorphosis

to form the marble-rich
mountains of northern Tuscany.

For the past 2000 years,

men have pried apart
these hills

to release giant blocks
of stone.

In 1968,
Gonzalo first visited Seravezza

and the nearby quarries

above Pietrasanta,
Querceta, and Carrara,

epicenters of stone sculpture,

the source
of perfect statuary marble.

He fell naturally into this
world of artists, artisans,

stonemasons, and quarrymen
all working in concert,

practicing techniques

that dated back
to the Roman age,

living off of a local material
so coveted

that Michelangelo himself

established
his own quarry here.

Gonzalo discovered a shepherd's
house built in 1678,

which he promptly bought

and named the "Loghetto,"
the Little Place.

Stone walls
teetering on a mountainside

with an abandoned quarry
as a backyard.

It was perfect.

The Loghetto became
Gonzalo's newest laboratory.

[♪]

[CHISEL WHIRRING]

[♪]

NARRATOR:
With stone,
Gonzalo practiced magic.

He chose a block of stone

for its character
and then developed it,

carving suggestive niches,
elaborating a playful scale,

striking a balance
between raw shape

and subtle human intervention.

Gonzalo discovered
entire worlds

within a block of stone,
no matter its size.

In the Loghetto's solitude,

with the perspective drawn
from these ancient hills,

Gonzalo invented
an artistic language.

[♪]

Gonzalo wanted to create
a playful absence,

stone that could be read
like a sentence without vowels,

only enough context
to suggest definition.

He crafted sparse structures
in whose spaces

entire histories
could be glimpsed.

He loved turning inert rock
into a world unto itself.

Gonzalo worked stone
differently

than the community of sculptors
who congregated in Seravezza.

Self-taught, his tactics ranged
from masterful to primitive.

He never sought finesse
or a delicate rendering.

He preferred a rough,
rudimentary approach.

He never relied on
assistants or artisans.

He always worked the stone
on his own.

The process of constructing
was a captivating game.

"You have to make the lock,

and then make the key,"
he would say.

Each stone was a puzzle,

a balance of proportion,
scale, and angle.

An interplay of form,
shape, and size.

An invitation
to imagine, reference,

and travel through time.

Because of
the towering quarries,

the ancient tradition,
and artistic infrastructure,

working stone in Italy

meant working stone
on the largest scale

and Gonzalo
experimented widely.

The Loghetto
was a private empire,

a place out of time
where Gonzalo labored

in joyful solitude, entirely
dedicated to his vision.

Free to execute work
on a monumental scale,

he gathered stones around him,

displaying them
for the wind and stars,

letting them
play against one another.

He would spend half
of every year here in Italy,

an annual counterbalance
to his life in New York.

He sculpted for himself

according to interior laws
and whims.

This was
Gonzalo's soulful kingdom,

echoing with his language
and graced with his monuments.

[♪]

[HAMMER STRIKING]

If you go to Italy,

you run into
a lot of very, ahem,

serious sculptors there,
looking for the perfect

block of solid white statuary,

or they'll be
looking for something

that's completely faultless
and cubed up.

And, you know,
Gonzalo was always

looking for stuff
that already had a life,

which is usually
referred to as junk.

But he would look for stuff
that had a patina,

that already had
some time on it. And, um...

Uh...
And then refine or un-refine it

to fit his own narrative.

[♪]

NARRATOR:
Back in New York,

far from the stone-rich
Italian mountains,

Gonzalo used the metropolis
as his own personal quarry.

His friends and children
scoured the city

in search of construction
or demolition sites.

Gonzalo would buy,

or often steal
in the dark of night,

old cornerstones,
frontispieces,

and discarded masonry
of limestone or brownstone.

In the dark of night,
he and his co-conspirators

would wheel
these scavenged stones

through the city streets
back to his studio.

The work Gonzalo produced
in Manhattan

was literally
of the city itself.

Gonzalo gave himself fully
to his studies,

to his thinking and reading,
and to his carving.

His practice required
a determined focus

that left him distant,
sometimes inaccessible.

ELENA:
I remember one day, he said,
"Who is an artist?

An artist is somebody
who dedicates

their entire life to do this.

Not an amateur, a weekend
painter is not an artist.

A weekend artist
is not a real artist.

Whatever they do,
could be good or bad,

but an artist is if he dedicates
his life to do this."

He didn't change his art,
his life of art,

whatever happened.

Maybe it's a good thing,
or not so good for his family

because he was not
a perfect father.

But he knew his time
was not eternal.

And even when he was young,
you know,

he said, "I have to work.
I have to work.

I can't spend a moment
of my life without doing this."

And he did it,
he did until the last day.

NARRATOR:
Gonzalo's single-mindedness,

his devotion to his vision
and his work,

left little room
for much else.

His artistic pursuits
made marriage difficult

and family life strained.

[♪]

In 1974,
he and Elizabeth separated,

and Gonzalo drifted off
into his own world.

He moved to the loft
on Great Jones Street

in Manhattan's East Village.

The apartment,
with its dusty studio

and hidden Sancto Sanctorum,

was a private space,
his own universe.

It was there, working alone,

that Gonzalo labored
to master his vision,

to give it wholeness
and depth.

His vision only blossomed
with time, reflection,

and, increasingly,
with solitude.

Visions flooded his mind.

Gonzalo's inner
and outer worlds

offered a bazaar of forms.

Characters, shapes, ruins
half-imagined, half-referenced,

merged into creations
wholly his own.

[MAN CHANTING INDISTINCTLY]

CAIO:
Yeah, but there's no perfect
translation in the end.

DE REGGI:
Enigmas were--
You know, he made

all these pieces
full of crypts, you know.

The crypt for him, you know,

Egypt with all the tombs
that you have to go down.

That fact that you had, like,
asarcophage,you know.

How many times
he madesarcophage,

something which was buried,
something which was hidden,

something which was--

You need to open it up
to see it, you know.

How many pieces he made
with the thing

that you could actually, "Oh."
You know, discover.

So mystery.

He would dig in, you know.
And then enigma.

Yeah, enigma.
How did they do that?

[♪]

[♪]

HART:
I mean, legacy
is such a bizarre combination

of different kinds of luck,
you know,

and the right things happening
at the right time.

And sometimes it's the market,
sometimes it's one critic,

sometimes it doesn't happen
at all in a lifetime.

There's just no telling
how or why

or when or where somebody
will connect with enough of us

in the so-called "art world"
that they make an impact,

and somehow, they get
affixed in the firmament

in a meaningful way.

There was a general awareness.

It was a name at least you knew.
Gonzalo Fonseca.

Um, you know...
Again, he wasn't a hermit.

He was friends
with people in the art world.

He knew people in the art world
and other artists.

Um, I think people
were generally aware of him.

But I don't think there was

a widespread understanding
of his work.

He's not a good
figure illustration

in any one of the standard
canonical texts

about this-ism to that-ism
to that-ism.

No, he's something else.

[♪]

NARRATOR:
Gonzalo sat quietly outside
the art world,

but stood firmly at the center
of his own creative universe.

He labored tirelessly
and accomplished much.

In 1968,
Gonzalo was commissioned

to build a public artwork

for the Olympic Games
in Mexico City.

He designed a tower,

a 36-foot-tall
concrete structure,

a whimsical display of his work
on a truly monumental scale.

He participated in art shows

and had his own work displayed
in museums and exhibitions

in the U.S., Brazil,
Venezuela, Spain, Italy.

Jorge Luis Borges
and Marcel Duchamp

were dinner guests
in his home.

He knew Louise Bourgeois,
remembered Franz Kline

as a "simple man,
like his paintings,"

and recalled that de Kooning

was "very demanding
on the girls."

Gonzalo and Isamu Noguchi
became close

while working at the same
stone yard in Italy.

Kindred spirits,
both quite solitary.

Yet, as his vision
grew more distinct,

so did the contrast between
Gonzalo and the art world.

Increasingly, he loathed
its fanfare and artifice.

Gonzalo seemed to empathize

with a quote
from Marcel Duchamp

who wrote that,
"The more I live among artists,

"the more I'm convinced
that they're fakes

"from the moment
they get to be successful

in the smallest way."

Gonzalo believed in an art
made for its own sake,

and he felt increasingly alone
in its pursuit.

He wrote that his colleagues
from Uruguay

could only judge his work

by the 1940s standards
of the Taller,

that friends
and fellow artists in Italy

were too involved in the work
and its production

to have any real perspective,
and that in New York,

he could not share
his anxieties

and concerns with anyone.

"You have to rely on
yourself only," wrote Gonzalo.

"I guess you build
your own amphitheater

"with your own
public in yourself,

and then dialogue with them,
still inside yourself."

Despite his feelings
of isolation

and his misgivings
about the art world,

he persisted,
confident in his practice,

buoyed by the serious artists
that he admired

and the history
that he brought forth.

In 1990,
Gonzalo represented Uruguay

at the Venice Biennale.

Despite the great honor,

Gonzalo remained more content

making work than showing it.

He was always uneasy
in a gallery,

put off by the crowds
and formalities.

He would often say
that an artist should be judged

by the numbers of exhibitions
he declines.

A man apart,
he was most himself

in a stone yard,
with a chisel in hand.

Or in his quarry,
his work's truest setting,

his amphitheater.

Gonzalo was never done.

His sculptures existed

in a state of slow,
meticulous change.

It was only when a piece
left his studio

that it was truly finished.

He therefore
kept most works around,

watching their textures change
and erode,

and the ground become firm
under their weight.

CAIO:
My father, especially
in the last 10 or 15 years,

receded from exhibiting
to some degree.

His relationship with selling
his work was curious

in that he wanted to make

the minimum amount
of money to keep going.

Um, and this was not
an affectation of his.

I think it was his way,
in some way,

of just rejecting

a kind of commercial aspect,
and also a kind of sense

that the honor
and the rightness

of what he was doing
should ultimately...prevail.

Or that it was expression
of his faith in that process.

But he very much was,

and he said he was,
you know, a studio artist.

That's where he lived
and breathed.

And he was not out there

as a promoter for himself.
He was...

a working artist.
And he sort of had this

right-or-wrong,
old-school-or-not view

that the work would ultimately,
whatever virtues it had,

would speak for itself.

Certainly, in his later years,
I think he...

[♪]

You know, he said to me

that, you know, some artists
want money or fame,

or any other thing,

but he was certain
he wanted time.

NARRATOR:
Time.

Time to continue digging
through the world.

Time to continue
to refine his vision,

to simplify his expression.

Time to watch age
wear down his sculptures,

to break his stones
into even smaller,

even more evocative fragments.

Or maybe just time
to keep working.

Time defined his work.

So much of what Gonzalo loved
bore the scars of time,

the patina of age.

He loved ruins
and sites or objects

whose incomplete,
broken-up form

required the imagination
to fill in the backstory.

Gonzalo put his faith in time.

He wrote of his admiration
for Franz Schubert,

for his brilliance
and his poverty.

As Gonzalo had it, Schubert
could not afford a piano

and never heard his last piece,
"The Quintet in C,"

which he wrote
just before his death.

"None of his friends,"
wrote Gonzalo,

"made any effort
to advance his cause.

"None attempted to raise him
from the bleak obscurity

"which he accepted
with such gentle

"and undemanding complacency.

"Surely they cannot
have sensed

"that a man of Schubert's
phenomenal humility

could not be trusted
to promote his own success."

CAIO:
It looks good in the sun.

ISABEL:
He just didn't
have time for it.

I really feel that he felt
under pressure with time.

He had a lot of work
that he wanted to do,

and it took a long time to
do it by himself with a chisel.

You know, it took a long time.

It's funny,
he cared about immortality.

I mean, he cared about
sort of the true, uh, art world,

if you will, that his work would
be of lasting significance.

Of course he cared about that,

and I think any artist
who's serious cares about that.

He made the decision,
later on especially,

that he just wasn't going
to use his time for that.

He wasn't-- He just--

He was gonna do the thing
no one else could do,

which was to make the work.

[MAN SINGING IN ITALIAN]

[♪]

NARRATOR:
Man first used stone
to craft rudimentary tools

and weapons
millions of years ago.

Temples were built of stone.

Pyramids.

Entire empires.

Somewhere along the way,
man made art out of stone.

Sculpture.

Stone as symbol.

Humans have spent millennia
cutting shape out of stone,

using their hands
to rend meaning out of rock.

Gonzalo gloried
in this tradition,

in the work it required
and all it stood for.

He made that tradition
his own.

[CHISEL WHIRRING]

By the end of his life,

Gonzalo embodied
the very meaning of stone.

In Jefferson's monument,
there's no tomb there

but it's a monument tomb.

[SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY]

NARRATOR:
Gonzalo trusted
in an afterlife.

He trusted that what he left
behind would outlast him.

He took care to make the most
of his time alive,

a stretch of days whose span

he knew to be minuscule
in the scale of eternity.

Gonzalo revered vessels
that shuttled one

from here to the afterlife
and back again.

He knew that we moved through
a world occupied by the dead,

an ever-layering accumulation
of the past.

He dug through these layers.

He searched
for the deepest veins.

He sought gems
amongst the strata.

He journeyed through life
by looking to the dead,

by learning from those
long passed,

by seeking beauty
and mystery and truth

in the clues
and fragments left behind.

It was death
that brought Gonzalo

to stone in the first place.

In 1964,
Gonzalo made a headstone

for the grave of a friend

which the Queens cemetery
rejected.

It was Gonzalo's first stone,
Membra Disjecta.

Of the many deaths
that pushed Gonzalo

in one direction or another
over the course of his life,

the death of his oldest son,
Bruno, in 1994,

wounded him most profoundly.

A brilliant painter himself,
Bruno died at 36.

For Gonzalo,
there were no pieces

he could pick up and reassemble
in the wake

of the loss of his own child
in his own lifetime.

It was a heartbreaking
confirmation

of Gonzalo's
own anxiety about time.

Without the body,
it's called a cenotaph.

[SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY]

CAIO:
Recorded for all time.

These were the first...

DE REGGI:
One of his daughters
told me once:

"Oh... He did what he wanted."

At the end, um,

he's a man that showed

some kind, a certain pursuing,
you know, a certain...

You know, the steadiness.

The fact that in the spring,
he would come.

In the fall,
he would go, you know.

This kind of, uh...

The vision I have
of Gonzalo is a man that, uh...

had found a certain balance,
you know. And, uh...

And search was his main friend,
you know.

He was a man of search.

[♪]

NARRATOR:
In June of 1997, Gonzalo flew
from New York to Italy.

He kissed the tarmac
upon his arrival in Pisa.

As he was driven home
from the airport,

he quietly commented on
favorite sites along the route.

At home, exhausted,
Gonzalo went to bed early.

When he noticed his bedside
reading light had broken,

he declared
to the house's caretaker:

"That's how I wanna go out.
Like a light bulb."

By the next morning,
Gonzalo was dead.

A peculiar knowingness
surrounded Gonzalo's passing.

A neighbor mentioned
being visited

by Gonzalo
in a dream that night

only to wake
to news of his death.

Another friend described
a swarm of fireflies

around the Loghetto
that same evening.

He had long told friends
and family members

that he wanted to be buried
in Seravezza,

laid to rest beside carvers
and quarrymen

in the shadow
of those great hills.

[♪]

CAIO:
Stone is just stone.

You find a lump of stone
on the street,

and it is what it is.

When you look
at a piece of stone

in a demolition and you look at
one of my father's sculptures,

you wonder
what has to have happened

for that piece to suddenly no
longer just be a lump of stone

and have a kind of

wonderful, artistic incantation
about it.

And that is an alchemy that
he invented and he executed.

And I think that's--
He really lived for that.

And it's all there
in his work.

And when he told me:

"Don't worry
about expressing yourself.

Your entire personality

and everything
will be in your work."

And it really is
such a true statement,

at least in his case.

NARRATOR:
Gonzalo Fonseca's life
recedes further into the past.

Whether his work
will be excavated, exhumed,

dusted off and reassembled
remains an open question.

Will it be brought
back into the present,

beautiful evidence
of something once great?

Will his work be lit by gallery
lights or covered in vines?

Will future generations
take stock of his vision

and make use of that wisdom?

Or will his stones
sink back into the soil?

Gonzalo would have embraced
any of time's whims.

Any outcome.

Any fate.

[♪]

[MAN SINGING
IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE]

[WOMAN ULULATING]

[WOMAN ULULATING]