"Art, then... was only a continuation of what lives and surges within Nature; it grew directly out of Nature; Nature satisfied the same needs as a mother..." Goethe as the Founder of a New Science of Aesthetics
 
When we engage with biomorphic sculpture, as artists or collectors, we build a bridge between our modern lifestyle and our regenerative source, nature. Learn more about the art movement that seeks a reunion with nature, and how classical thinkers like Goethe found a way to consciously experience nature's manifold forms.

Why We Forgot How to Look
As adults, our thinking is predominantly analytical by nature–for risk management and pattern recognition. We live in hypothetical futures. We've forgotten how to be like children, who live in the moment and know how to play. To create art is to recall that state of being that absorbs life's vibrancy when creating and envisioning a world that doesn't yet exist. Becoming conscious as we grow up has a double effect: it separates us from nature, but it also opens the possibility of reconnecting with it as self-aware individuals — this time by choice rather than instinct.

The question of the human being’s twofold relationship with nature in the context of biomorphism is explored in this piece. Derived from the Greek for "life" and "form," biomorphism aims to capture the dynamic life of nature through inexhaustible artistic expression. Creating like nature was the ideal of many twentieth-century artists, among them Jean Arp, who rejected the catastrophic logic of a world reeling from war. That historical backdrop helps explain why biomorphic forms felt so urgent at the time. (1)

Art that rejected tyranny offered a way back to something whole, at a moment when so much had been broken apart. But the question the movement leaves open is worth pondering today: is thinking really divorced from nature, or is it an extension of nature? Can it become ever more "living"?

The Habit of Naming Things
​We have a tendency nowadays to take things apart and label them, the way scientists work in a lab. If I look at a plant, I look at what's different about the petal and the leaf, and so on. To be honest, I don't even have to look that hard, because I've already been told the name — "plant," "tree," "rose" — and my mind assumes it already knows what it is. I pass by it without much notice. The same goes for art and objects. We are not in the habit of giving much time and thought to what we see around us. In response to this inartistic way of categorizing and making sense of the world, the Surrealists circumvented rationality. Jean Arp's collages were created by rejecting intellectual control by letting the pieces of paper find their own composition — a process he called Chance. This may explain why his artwork has a youthful, undefined quality. 

“Biomorphism art stands as a testament to the human fascination with nature’s beauty and complexity.” (2)

The multitude of nature can be overwhelming to the observer, and labeling and categorizing helps us cope with an abundance of life that, at first glance, looks chaotic. Goethe found a way to see the whole and locate a hidden ordering principle within the multitude of plant forms, which is instructive for looking at biomorphic sculpture. This is called “Urpflanze,” German for the archetypal plant, which is an ideal botanical model from which all plant forms are derived. (3) For him, the plant revealed itself as a whole and its originator revealed itself too — something beyond what the ordinary eye could see, what Goethe called "the true Proteus who can hide or reveal himself in all plant forms." He had watched the same shape-shifting law working across the whole range of plant forms, with his own eyes. When he later described this to Schiller, who objected that this was an idea and not an experience, Goethe answered simply: "Then I see my ideas with my eyes."

From Surrealism to Goetheanism
Twentieth-century Surrealism aimed to create directly from the subconscious, to feel one with nature by bypassing the analytical mind altogether. Goetheanism takes a different route to the same destination. Nothing needs to be bypassed, because thinking — pure thinking — was never outside nature to begin with. It is a human being's experience of the essential in nature.
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“Goethe’s thinking was not rigid with inflexible contours; it was a thinking in which the concepts continually metamorphose. Thereby his concepts became, if I may put it this way, intimately adapted to the process that plant nature itself goes through.” –Rudolf Steiner, via Nature Institute (4)

Where Surrealism tries to get underneath thought, Goetheanism asks us to follow thought all the way through, until it becomes a kind of perception in its own right.

Biomorphic sculpture, like nature, keeps growing and transforming. It enhances our perception: we do not immediately know what we are looking at. It brings the soothing shapes and textures of nature while leaving us space for discovery. In stimulating our curiosity about form, we continue the journey the artist began and lived through in the creative process.

​Q & A: Pisapia's Sculpture Process

You start from a platonic solid — a fixed, geometric form — and end with something that reads as organic, almost grown. Where in that process does the "growing" actually happen? Is there a moment you can point to?
 
It happens right at the start, actually — I begin from geometric solids, but the moment I start adding roundedness, that's already growth. The solid begins to shift, and somewhere in that shifting it becomes alive. It's less a switch than a threshold I cross while pursuing the form through imagination.

Steiner's idea of pure thinking suggests the form isn't decided in advance, but isn't accidental either. When you're working the double-bent plane, do you know where a surface is going before it gets there, or does the piece tell you?

I stay away from flat surfaces. I'm looking for a curve that can sing — taut, not soft. Nature doesn't have dead surfaces; the energy of life has to keep flowing through the form, and a flat plane can't carry that. What happens is the starting geometry gets taken over by what I think of as the water element. The straight line doesn't disappear — it's still there, but now serving life and movement invisibly, inside the double curving plane. Technically this often means raising a lifeless flat plane into a lifelike hyperboloid plane, which works as a kind of template for infinite variation. So in a way I'm not inventing the movement — I'm tapping consciously into something nature already does, and letting the geometry become its vehicle. (More on this in the blog post on the double-bent plane.) 

On The Double Bent Plane: https://www.flavius-pisapia.com/blog/the-double-bent-plane-a-journey-of-self-transformation
 
Goethe said he could "see his ideas with his eyes." Is there a moment in your process — maybe holding the material, maybe stepping back from it — where you'd say something similar happens to you?
 
I don't impose an idea onto the material — I try to find a balance, extending nature without losing myself in it. The closest I can describe it: I look, and I meet what I'm perceiving with my own thinking, so I'm thinking with and through the material, not about it from a distance. The working knowledge of the language of form enables my collaboration with it from the inside. Every form is different and requires a unique treatment. I try to enhance the living aspect of the plane, bring out what wants to emerge and harmonize it.
 
You work in series. Does one piece in a series ever change how you understand an earlier one — the way a later leaf might reveal something about the first leaf on the same stem?
 
With a series I'm looking for a sense of what's trying to come through — it's not definite yet, more an observation I'm sensing what is arising from form to form as I go. There's a leading idea, but it isn't a concept I'm illustrating — something like a theme. Unlike conceptual work, I don't start with a fixed image in mind; I arrive at the form through discovery.

Sometimes a big jump between two pieces is right, but there has to be a red thread holding them together. That's where fresh eyes matter — coming back to the series with some distance, imagining the gaps between pieces, the invisible stage in between one form and the next. That work is really how I judge whether the metamorphosis works from one piece to another.
 
A lot of contemporary sculpture treats the subconscious as the route to something "natural" — chance, instinct, letting go of intention. Your work seems to take the opposite route, through conscious form-finding. Was that a deliberate choice, or did it just turn out that way?
 
It's completely deliberate — it's in line with a spiritual practice of increasing awareness and consciousness with intention. The idea matters as a starting point, but I try not to overcontrol it. It's only by holding that balance that I can extend nature beyond its own limits — work with it in a way that takes it further than it could go on its own. This would not be possible without a working knowledge of formative principles; I have to actually understand nature's form-creating principles. So no, it's not chance, and it's not instinct. It's closer to what nature is already doing.