Giacometti: the never-ending task

Abstract

The notion of aggressiveness as proposed by the English psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott in its function to set the reality of the world helps understand the destructive aspects of artistic creation. Whenever the sculptor, painter and draftsman Alberto Giacometti attempts to see reality, he faces the impossible and necessary task of concluding his works. But the work becomes the pendulous gesture of destruction and construction. Such gesture opens a spatial and temporal hiatus in the present. This seems to define a tragic art and its fate with no origin and no end, such as the high western modernity has taught us to experiment.