CHRISTIAN PATH
What transmutation would Guido Dettoni have depicted from the creations shaped by parishioners of St. Ignatius Church in Singapore on the day of the parish feast, July 27, 2014?
Ranging in age from 6 to 81, twenty-four parishioners gathered for a collective creative experience shaping wax, blindfolded, listening to a chosen reading from the Parish about the vision of St Ignatius…. that God has come in person among us to transform our world and give it hope. The voices and prayers of the Sunday mass celebrated in the nearby Church were reaching the venue.
Guido Dettoni discovered that the images of the shapes led to walking the path of Christianity.
Participants were strongly invited to let their state of mind and emotions flow through their hands to matter. They were asked to not have any intention of shaping something specific.
The shapes generated are always unique: they are those and not others. Guido Dettoni looks at each one as a part of a whole, that witnesses the intellectual and, in this particular case, the spiritual ones experienced by the participants. He interprets and makes use of them to achieve the transmutation of the images of their points of view to compose a sequence depicting the religiosity of this experience.
The images of these shapes have led Guido Dettoni to a Transmutation depicted by a sequence of images.
In Every step of the Path, we can see the shapes which have formed it.
In the beginning, we discover God’s eye, followed by the apple, the fruit of temptation, and then we see the baptismal font where the original sin is forgiven. A cross, in exact symmetry, appears as the symbol of the coming Christianity after Jesus is baptized and later crucified. The Glass Windows give shape and color to the light entering the spaces of the Temples to evoke the divine; they are generated by layers of the same image flipped horizontally and vertically, like in a kaleidoscope, and then overlapped over them and/or over another image also duplicated like the previous one.
The Rose appears. Since antiquity, a symbol of mystery and for early Christians a visual expression of paradise but also for martyrdom and Mary. In this path, the offer of a Rose precedes the explicit representation of the Crucifixion on the Golgotha, which is made of all the images of the shapes excluding those composing the Crucifixion. In this path, the Rose disappears, becoming the Golgotha.
All these themes may be interpreted as they were generated within a common spirit impregnating everybody during the process. Perhaps, individual efforts become testimonies of a joint religious moment shared by everyone.
Golgotha means in Hebrew skull. The skull at the foot of the cross represents the redemption of the sin of Adam and the birth of a new man. According to the Judeo-Christian tradition, Mount of Golgotha was the burial place of Adam. For this reason, where lie the mortal remains of the first sinful man, the Cross was hoisted. In it the Son of God, Jesus Christ, died to redeem us from sin and rescue us from death, giving us eternal life. The Golgotha is the Symbol of the triumph of the cross above sin and death and a clear allusion to the Resurrection of Christ.