At a time when art is running towards dematerialization and spirituality seems to dissolve in the frenzy of contemporaneity, Marc Vinciguerra asserts himself as one of the few architects of the invisible.
His work is not limited to sculpture, philosophy or theology: it is the living fusion of all these dimensions, a map to orient oneself in an increasingly fragmented world.
Internationally recognized, exhibited in prestigious venues such as the Venice Biennale, the Bombay Beach Biennale and the Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Sicilia (MACS), Vinciguerra builds not just works, but portals to a new experience of infinity.
Among his most emblematic creations: The Triptych of The Religion of Atheism, The Transfiguration and The Invisible Cathedral, real sculpted posters of his vision.
In its sculptures, existence becomes tension, the sacred becomes flesh, spirituality is stripped of all dogma to find man in his fragile immensity.
Vinciguerra is not an artist who seeks answers: he is a man who shapes questions, digging into matter and consciousness.
In the course of this meeting, his thought was revealed with the same force as a sculpture that emerges from the marble: every response, every intuition has engraved a trace, not only in the space of words, but also in the consciousness of the listener.
This is the story of a dialogue that has become journey.
Connecting art, philosophy and theology was not an occasional choice for Marc Vinciguerra: it was an urgency, present since the beginning of his artistic practice.
"I love art," he says, "but I raise my ideas even higher, so that I don’t call my work 'art' but 'philosophical art'."
In every sculpture that he creates, Marc not only engraves forms but concepts: each work is the fruit of a philosophical idea settled and then carved into matter.
It is guided by a deep conviction, echoed in the words of Umberto Eco:
"The task of culture is to explain the infinite."
Vinciguerra is fully committed to this task and adds:
"I go beyond Eco’s question and ask: how can we better explain the infinite? Is our relationship with infinity in the 21st century progressing or regressing?"
As he speaks, his voice seems to be sculpture itself, outlining the thought of the German philosopher Schelling:
"There is only one essence of the infinite, but each century interprets it in its own way. The infinite is not fixed and immutable; it is a determination that evolves with each epoch."
Its purpose is clear:
"Explaining the infinite from the point of view of our time, helping to carve a new face in the geometry of the sacred."
A living geometry, which changes into new symbols, never equal to itself.
His philosophical art thus becomes a challenge and a mission:
"The great satisfaction in philosophical art is that when you find a new philosophical vision you have the feeling of writing a new chapter in the history of ideas. First I try to unveil our historical God, then to understand how this 21st century God contributes to the essence of the eternal God."
In these words the tension and greatness of his path is reflected: sculpting not only forms, but the infinite itself.
If the title The Religion of Atheism appears powerful and provocative, it is because it contains a deep tension, daughter of our time.
Marc Vinciguerra, with the usual lucidity, retraces the roots of this intuition:
"We are living in extraordinary times: we are witnessing a religious revolution in the Western world."
His reflection starts from a distance. During the French Revolution of 1789, atheism opposed theism head-on, starting a process of massive dechristification.
In the following centuries, the West progressively moved away from religion, turning cathedrals into empty museums.
"The twentieth century celebrated with pride secularization, contrasting sacred and secular."
Yet, in the 21st century, the narrative seems to change.
"Today, the most important sociologists of religion – Charles Taylor, Linda Mercadante, Richard Kearney – tell another story: we are abandoning religion not for atheism, but for a new religious experience outside of religion."
Believers themselves rebel, not against the sacred, but against the institutional structures that try to harness it.
Vinciguerra asks then:
"Is being atheist more religious than having a religion? Does atheism possess a religious force that we have not yet understood? Is it possible that God wants us to be atheists in order to get closer to infinity?"
In his vision, the absence of God does not cancel the thirst for the sacred: it multiplies it.
"I believe that true religion is at the intersection of secular and religious, and that true atheism should be. Non-religious atheism betrays its very essence."
His words carve a radical thought:
"The drive towards the sacred does not go out with the absence of God, rather it is amplified. This is why I believe in religious atheism, because you can easily deny God, but you cannot deny the religious states that manifest themselves even in the absence of God."
And finally he asks a question that sounds like a manifesto:
"If a religious state is possible without God, then where does this secular illumination come from? All my work is an attempt to answer this question."
For Marc Vinciguerra, matter is never neutral. Each material chosen vibrates in harmony with the idea that generated it.
"I choose the materials according to the contents and sensations that I want to convey."
Thus he introduces his creative process, where marble and neon, bronze and cardboard become bridges between visible and invisible.
"Both marble and neon have a mystical glow that I love."
It tells of a journey that starts from bronze, passes through marble and fiberglass, until arriving at lighter and unexpected materials:
"Today I work with cardboard treated with chemicals that make it as hard as metal but very light."
Every evolution in matter corresponds to a spiritual evolution.
"My choice of materials also reflects my spiritual path: from gravity to grace."
And it is precisely this passage that Vinciguerra sculpts in works such as Gravity and Grace, where a figure floats suspended in the green gas of a uranium neon, embodying the spiritual lightness that his path seeks.
Even if the means and the idea are intertwined, it is always the philosophy that guides the hand:
"Even if there is a relationship between medium and ideas, in my creative process are always the ideas that prevail. Art for me serves philosophy."
A statement that sounds like a personal credo:
"I believe that ideas are more beautiful than art itself, because they transform existence."
Through matter, Vinciguerra is not limited to forming forms: he sculpts spiritual trajectories.
For many artists, sculpting is an intimate dialogue with matter.
For Marc Vinciguerra, it is something even more profound: a meditation that is rooted not in the matter but in ideas.
"When I sculpt, the meditation on ideas far precedes that on matter."
His focus is not on marble or bronze, but on the invisible structure of religious feelings that cross our time.
"I do not meditate on the materials, but on the structure of the religious feelings of our time."
Yet, when ideas find their form, when philosophy becomes matter, then the work manages to speak for itself:
"If I can faithfully translate these ideas into sculpture, the audience will feel what I felt."
Vinciguerra knows the language of materials intimately and listens to them as if they were voices from different worlds.
"Marble gives me the feeling that the light comes from inside the world. Bronze gives the feeling that the light comes from outside. The fiberglass attenuates the light, while the treated cardboard conveys the feeling of the skin of the gods."
In every choice, in every gesture, the tension between matter and spirit that guides his work is revealed: a tension lived, thought, sculpted.
In the work of Marc Vinciguerra we can feel, powerful and silent, the echo of the great classical tradition.
A deep bond, built in its formative years.
"As a young man, I was deeply impressed by Michelangelo and Rodin for the courage with which they faced the God or the non-God of their time."
It is with Rodin that Vinciguerra feels a special affinity. Growing up in Paris, the Rodin Museum became a second home for him:
"I attended the Rodin Museum as a child and then as a philosophy student at the Sorbonne. I taught drawing there, and once, pretending to be blind, I managed to touch its statues: a mystical experience that overwhelmed my senses."
Through that living matter, touched in secret, Vinciguerra breathed the cultural trauma of the late nineteenth century, when Paris was a metaphysical capital.
"The dissolution of traditional Christianity and, at the same time, a new enigmatic mysticism were felt. This cultural trauma is felt in the poetry of Mallarmé, in the music of Debussy and Satie, in the statues of Camille Claudel."
In those years, art and spirituality merged in the dialogue between the absence and presence of God.
Today, Vinciguerra no longer seeks a direct dialogue with those artists:
"My task is to decipher the unfinished mystery that they have perceived: intuit that the death of God, far from annihilating religion, brings us closer to its true essence."
With his sculptures, he continues to carve what Michelangelo, Rodin and Claudel had only glimpsed: the sacred that survives the collapse of its own cathedrals.
At a time when art seems to dissolve in digital dematerialization, Marc Vinciguerra chooses the resistance of matter.
"We live in an era of dematerialization and digitization of art. But I feel the physical need to build, to carry on my shoulders the scaffolding of my work."
For him, relying entirely on technology would mean interrupting his human and spiritual journey:
"If I left everything to the computer, I would stop growing as a human being and stop connecting with my revelations."
His concept of art does not end in the final object, but lies above all in the journey, in the search, in the effort to discover:
"For me, the beauty of art lies in research: in being the active protagonist of that research."
Vinciguerra describes himself as a wanderer of thought, a pilgrim of authentic beauty:
"I must be willing to cross a thousand deserts to find an authentic definition of beauty."
And what animal could represent him better?
"That’s why my favorite animal is the camel, the philosopher who walks non-stop."
With every step, every sculpture, every idea carved into matter, Vinciguerra challenges the drift of dematerialization and reaffirms the sacred value of physical presence in the world.
If for many art is a simple aesthetic exercise, for Marc Vinciguerra it is an existential necessity.
An urgency rooted in the human need to find a collective sense, in an age that has lost its great stories.
"Today art is orphaned by meta-narratives."
Postmodernism, observes Vinciguerra, had the merit of demolishing the great ideological narratives that had suffocated the individual.
But that criticism left a void:
"Postmodernism has rightly criticized the great ideological tales, but it has also left the West without a collective narrative."
Without a common thread linking existences, we are exposed to an ancient risk:
"Without shared stories, we become vulnerable to the return of the worst ideologies."
For this reason, Vinciguerra sees the 21st century as a very high task for art:
"The role of art in the 21st century is to find a new open narrative: a system of thought that is not totalitarian, but gives men a meaning and a worldview from which can be born a new art greater than sterile postmodern individualism."
Through his philosophical sculpture, Marc Vinciguerra tries to give shape to this new narrative: an art that does not lock up but free.
In the path of Marc Vinciguerra, every experience has left a mark, like chisel blows on the soul.
"There are so many episodes that have marked me."
He remembers one in particular: a night in Venice, along the shores of the Adriatic, while strolling with the great-great-grand daughter of Charles Darwin, professor of poetry at Oxford.
"She told me how Darwin’s discoveries had affected his wife’s faith."
A dialogue that, under the sky of Venice, intertwined science, faith and poetry.
Other memories resurface with the same intensity:
"When I was the first to raise my hand during a poetry composition session in Venice with the winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry, or when I screened a film about my work at the Cini Foundation and Ian McEwan asked me questions about my artistic practice."
Marc tells with emotion the evening at MACS in Catania, when his Triptych of the Religion of Atheism was exposed under three vaults of an ancient monastery of the eighteenth century:
"Giuseppina Napoli is a rare pearl, and I remember her mother who hung on the wall of the museum a sacred family fabric to intensify the revealing atmosphere of the work. I’ll never forget it."
Even in the desert of Bombay, memories are deeply etched:
"The lectures I gave in the middle of the desert before extraordinary philosophers, or when I built a five-meter high fragment of my secular cathedral."
It was there, at the Bombay Beach Biennale, that Marc reached a new artistic awareness:
"That’s where I started writing on my sculptures themselves. Bombay is the place where art and philosophy have completely merged into my work. The installations I made there are sculptures, but also sacred books opened in the desert."
And finally, the moment that will remain forever in his heart:
"The great philosopher at Oxford University, Mark Wrathall, told me that my installation 'should become a place of pilgrimage'.
This compliment justifies my whole life."
Every encounter, every word, every gesture has helped to carve the deep meaning of his journey.
Among the most significant moments of his career, Marc Vinciguerra recalls his meeting with Sir Roger Scruton, one of the greatest contemporary British philosophers.
"The confrontation with Roger Scruton was extremely interesting. He was one of the most important philosophers in England at the time."
An image remains in memory:
"Someone painted us while we were talking about transcendence near a castle in Scotland."
For five consecutive summers, between Scotland and Venice, Marc had the opportunity to live in close contact with Scruton.
What struck him most was not only the acuity of his thought, but his inexhaustible thirst for knowledge.
"I remember that he had a small handwritten book in Arabic which he studied carefully between lessons. He continued to learn new languages, and sometimes went away to sit on a bench under a tree to write beautiful lectures, which he then declaimed at the end of dinners under the loggia of the Cini Foundation. A brilliant mind."
Standing next to Scruton has had a transformative effect:
"Being with him changed my life, because it made me realize that the greatest treasure of life is knowledge."
More than mere teachings, those moments conveyed to him a profound truth:
"There is a thing called high culture, and art should never be separated from philosophy, otherwise it risks becoming just wind."
While respecting each other, the two thinkers came to differ on a fundamental point:
"We both recognized the importance of the relationship between art and religion, but he believed that the greatest achievement of religion had already been achieved in the past, while I think the greatest achievement of religion has yet to come, and will be in the future."
What Marc preserves from those meetings, what he continues to sculpt in his daily practice, is a granitic certainty:
"A great artist must never confuse the era in which he lives with the obligation to be modern or contemporary at all costs."
A legacy that Vinciguerra honors every day, sculpting not only in the matter, but in time.
Among the most ambitious projects of Marc Vinciguerra is the realization of a non-religious cathedral: a place that makes visible the spiritual progress of our time.
"I will start the model of my secular cathedral next September. It is a really exciting project."
Not a traditional temple, but a space where secularism and religion meet in a new sacredness, without dogmas or borders.
"I want to create a cathedral in which what our time has brought as progress of the essence of religion becomes visible. A new religious symbol will be created to show the intersection between secularism and religion."
The project is already underway.
Marc sculpted the altar, where seven figures float in space, and chose a splendid Portoro marble slab for the floor.
He imagined two portals, the north and the south, each guarded by philosophers embodying opposing tensions:
"Saint Thomas Aquinas and Hegel will guard the northern portal, while Saint Augustine and Nietzsche will guard the southern portal."
An eternal dialogue that embraces all the directions that Western civilization could take.
The most exciting part?
"I will place the Treatise on Theology that I am writing inside the cathedral as an illuminated manuscript."
To unite thought and matter, writing and sculpture, in a total work.
The model will be large – about two meters high – and it will be possible to open and close the cathedral like a great spiritual doll house, with portals that will open on the altar, where the seven movements of his theology will be carved in ascent.
The symbolism will be everywhere, integrated in the space itself:
"Also through a metal symbol that I have created with new 'faithful' who will pray not a religion, but the essence of religion, which is more religious and more universal than religion itself."
Marc Vinciguerra is not simply building a cathedral: he is carving out a new language for the sacred, destined to survive beyond all historical boundaries.
If there is a dream that still lives in Marc Vinciguerra, it is to see his secular cathedral come alive in full size.
"That dream would be to transform the model of my cathedral into a real life-size cathedral."
It would not be necessary to build it from scratch:
"I could turn an abandoned church into a secular cathedral, where the secular enriches the religious rather than destroying them."
Some fragments of this dream are already reality:
"There are portions of my cathedral up to 5.5 meters high that lie in the California desert."
But the biggest dream is yet to be realized:
"It would be great, one day, to create a complete one, with an amphitheater where every week there is a program of philosophy classes."
It is not only architecture, it is not only art: it is an educational and spiritual act.
"Why philosophy classes in a cathedral? Because I believe, like Hegel, that philosophy and theology are the same thing, since infinity is destined, in the last analysis, to become knowledge."
In a world thirsty for meaning and devoid of shared directions, Marc Vinciguerra dreams of a temple where the infinite becomes living knowledge.
A place where art is not only beauty, but education of the soul.
"The world more than ever needs to be educated in its own beliefs."
If he were to leave a message to emerging artists, Marc Vinciguerra would not speak of success or style.
It would speak of historical responsibility and thirst for infinity.
"If an artist today is more interested in depth and meaning than pure form devoid of narration, I would tell him to try to insert what he calls meaning and depth into the flow of history, to ensure that his research is consistent with his own time."
Meaning and depth, he reminds us, are not abstract concepts:
"They are historical categories."
Their loss is not only a psychological crisis:
"We often lose meaning because the age in which we live does not have confidence in its definition of infinity, or because it has completely lost touch with it."
Vinciguerra quotes Carl Gustav Jung, the great psychologist who intuited something revolutionary:
"Many neuroses are not only psychological, but also result from the inability to connect with the infinite."
Jung spoke of theological neurosis: an anthropological thirst for unfulfilled meaning that can translate into self-destructive behaviors.
"The desire for infinity should be part of mental health care."
The question of infinity, Marc points out, is not just about religion but collective well-being.
And finally, his advice to artists is almost poetry:
"Read like a hermit, search like a prophet and love the atheist as much as the religious if you want to represent a religion that is truly religious."
In these words, the whole meaning of an art that wants to be care, light, and journey is contained.
Meeting Marc Vinciguerra is not just about sculpture.
It means crossing inner deserts, dialoguing with ancient and modern philosophers, laughing between a Rodin “touched in secret” and a lesson of life under a Venetian loggia.
With his work, Marc does not only shape the material: he sculpts paths for the infinite.
His art, his vision and his thought are a luminous testimony of how much we can – and must – still believe in the power of art as a journey to the very essence of the human being.
We, as camels patient in the desert of thought, can only follow him with deep esteem, admiration and sincere fascination.
We invite you to follow Marc on his official website marcvinciguerra.com and on Instagram.
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See you next time!
15.4.2025
