Page 425 - Christian Maas Full Book

Christian Maas, The silent Sculptor

The artist acts in the magnificent momentum of his strength and stands silent. From now on, his
artwork, not him, will endure the chatter’s assaults that will acclaim or criticize it.

Maas works in a complete state of innocence. Spontaneity in invention is the primary requisite to

a moving and durable artwork. No need to explain or justify his art, Christian Maas simply works in the
art God gave him to extend his life and also ours through this spectacle of a living force, keeping life’s

eternal one. Artworks are born and reproduce themselves like living beings fertilized in their ovum by a
fatal and involuntary power.

They are blows of enthusiasm, plastic spontaneous thoughts, direct plastic thoughts. Like a sur-

geon, Christian Maas, minutely dissects his subjects, breaking them down to recompose them better.
The relationships Christian Maas maintains with his models and assistants are extreme-

ly simple, discreet; together they do not ask themselves questions, everything is into action and
so is Maas’s language, who, at rest, always seems a little uncomfortable about doing nothing, as his inac-

tive hands look embarrassed about touching nothingness only, these hands which have hesitations, and
nostalgic movements of a blind man’s hands. Hands made to knead clay or wax, to caress the bodies of

women or settle on the leather of beautiful cars.

Cars indeed occupy an important place in Maas’s universe. He has possessed more than 160,
beautiful Italians or classic British, several Rolls Royces among which Corniches Cabriolets and even a

hearse Silver Cloud from 1958. He regards them as sculptures and beside its obvious function the car
becomes his best companion: inspired collaboratress Proust talked about. Indeed, it is often when in his

car, preferably by night, music as loud as possible, that Maas finds the best of his inspiration and con-
ceives his projects.

Christian Maas does not become attached to property, which is an illusion according to him:

Even your house isn’t yours, it belongs to the one watching it. He likes living in hostels or in houses
lent by his friends in every corner of the world, and finds happiness in the heart of studios while ma-

nipulating clay or in the front of melting overheated metal. If the sculptor has unravelled some of life’s
mysteries, a life pushed to its paroxysm, if we feel in contact with his artworks some kind of mysterious

and sacred emotion, it is because they introduce us within the heart of all that IS, real or apparent; his
premonition of the true reality is proof of his great love for life and nature, love made of dedi-

cation and disinterest in a world where everything becomes simple because Christian Maas
live in childhood’s universe, sculpture being an extraordinary game, and he stays as far away as possible

from adult’s preoccupations, having found solaces to an existence often painful and a hardship of living
in the triumph of his unique, magnificent work.

Christian Maas 434 CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ Vol. II

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