 Boutros Romhein in the “Canalie” workshop ANGEL, 2008, white Carrara marble, h 6,70 m, private collection, New york State
The artist at work
The artist at work
Boutros Romhein was born in Syria in 1949. He arrived in Italy in 1983 and since 1990 has lived and worked in Carrara.
In these few lines of biography we will have to follow the hawk's flight of this man, elderly yet immersed in the contemporary era. How many of the people who go up to the quarries of Carrara stop to look at the small cluster of houses which Boutros has brought back to new life? The wind of Palmyra blows between the stone columns in Romhein's homeland and when it gets here it blusters violently in the narrow space ornamented with blocks of "Canalie" marble... Here and there appear glimpses of Boutros's fine works and sometimes those of his students, who come from around the world to work on sculptures in the Apuan Alps, where the Babel of languages comes to life and is embodied in the ancient gestures of sculpture.
Sometimes some of his works, almost silently, with the tranquility of a truly timeless artist, take flight for faraway places... New york, Norway, California, Germany or Switzerland... The catalog of public works and monuments in refined and exclusive collections is long and exciting. The sky above "Canalie" brightens briefly. The sun seems almost shyly to graze the white surfaces, smooth and glowing, of Boutros's sculptures... The sky above Damascus is suffused with clouds of many colors in the freezing winter and parched by the sun in summer, kindling a myriad of images... The sky above Boutros's sculptures is renewed
at each dawn.
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