Nicolas Carone is known as a New York School painter whose figurative style is based on abstract principles. His sensitive drawings are especially appreciated. But few know him as a sculptor, so it comes as a surprise that during the last few decades he has produced an exceptional body of sculpture. Doubly surprising is the fact that the work is not based on the body which occupied him throughout his life. Rather these are carved stone heads that resonate a strange sense of the archaic and of antiquity. This is not to imply that they have anything in common with ancient sculpture nor even with the art of the Etruscans, whose ancestors inhabited the area where Carone has his remote studio in the Umbrian countryside.

Carone has always been secretive and selective about these works. You had to ask to see them. Among the students and teachers at theschool he founded at Montecastello del Vibio and in the graduate program of American University where I was teaching in Corciano, a nearby hillside town, Carone was something of a legend. Word got out that Nick was working on something new and strange. Something you had never seen before. So I went up to the studio in Doglio, where Carone was spending the season. And there I saw these incredible stone heads that were unlike anything I had seen before. True, they were related to various types of archaic, early Christian and Romanesque sculpture in their cut to the bone simplification and bold, stylized anti-naturalistic forms. Each was different and seemed to communicate some other message that you could not quite get a handle on and yet you felt it was some form of ancient wisdom. Many spoke of suffering in their expressionistic distortions.

When I read that Carone was interested in Gurdieff, the sculptures made sense to me. These were the sages—the “remarkable men”, the wise men one had to meet on the path of life in order to gain wisdom. A friend of the legendary mystic John Graham whose late works are mysteriously magical portraits, Carone has created a group of imaginary portraits that offer a similar sense of otherworldliness that is fascinating and inspiring.

–Barbara Rose