Original subtitles

NARRATOR: Much can be made out of scattered fragments.

From time to time, discarded rubble

can reveal lost histories.

[♪]

For the better part of the 20th century,

the artist Gonzalo Fonseca

worked in solitude and relative obscurity.

Traces of Fonseca remain inscribed in his works,

which are spread across the globe,

hidden in corners, concealed in memory.

There's an obscure term

sometimes used in archeology, "disjecta membra."

It refers to the method of reassembling a text

or an artifact by piecing together its broken shards,

trying to assemble a whole

trying to assemble a whole by collecting its scattered fragments.

by collecting its scattered fragments.

It calls back to the Egyptian myth of Osiris,

the murdered king whose dismembered body

is reassembled by his wife, the goddess Isis.

The term endures as a poetic expression of fragments

pieced together anew to tell the story of a whole.

To understand Gonzalo Fonseca and his artwork,

one must collect and attempt to reassemble what remains,

beginning with the stones he left behind.

[♪]

[♪]

History and the ages ran through him.

Fonseca climbed the great pyramids.

He traced words to their murky roots.

He knew ancient histories as though

he witnessed them himself.

Fonseca was a man of deep learning

and insatiable curiosity.

He was a conduit to the past,

to its myths, its lives, its traces,

but particularly to its forms.

Gonzalo Fonseca spent his life

rendering a playfully atavistic vision into stone.

To re-discover Fonseca is to uncover deeper truths

and wisdom gathered from the distant past.

Reassembling Fonseca is a journey

toward understanding the very meaning of stone.

[♪]

[♪]

MAN 1: All the things I know about Gonzalo's past,

I know from his family.

Gonzalo wouldn't let you know even where he was from.

He was not easy to-- I mean, he was reclusive.

And people really had to make this journey to him

and talk him into letting them come into his space.

WOMAN 1: Vim and vigor, full of life, cheerful,

endlessly interested in people, in human beings, in origin.

MAN 2: Let's just say that he had very little patience

for stupid or non-thinking people.

WOMAN 2: Fascinating. I think we were all in love with Gonzalo.

WOMAN 2: Fantastic sense of humor.

I mean, this was a man who always made fun.

WOMAN 3: Always fascinating because he would always come

with an idea that you would never expect.

That's why I say he was a true original.

MAN 5: There's not many artists I would think of

as being timeless, and Gonzalo certainly is.

WOMAN 3: I think that there is something

that propelled him to create his own--

His own antiquity, or his own culture,

or his own civilization in stone.

STEINER: Once you get in touch with someone like this,

who has this kind of knowledge, you really take advantage

because that will make a difference in your life.

Gonzalo was not depending on exhibitions,

gallerists, and all that theater.

He was just not depending into it, and this was a choice.

I saw people coming, giving him a check.

Writing here, "I give you 50,000 for this."

And he said, "Get the fuck out of here."

He didn't say this, but that was the message.

He said, "Just go, please go."

He could even get angry in that moment.

I was 20 years old, you look at this and you feel:

"Wow, this is a statement."

The person's not rich or something--

He doesn't need it or whatever.

It's like-- It's a statement.

It's something which is like, "Why?"

Standing for something else.

And Gonzalo stood for something else, for me, in so many ways.

NARRATOR: Gonzalo Fonseca hid in plain sight.

Born in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1922,

he spent the majority of his adult life in New York City.

Gonzalo lived through and made art

in the swelter of the 20th century.

He resided on the same block as Andy Warhol

and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Yet he was far from that world.

NARRATOR: One could hardly consider Gonzalo part of any era,

any scene or movement.

Gonzalo's work directed him toward the deep past

and often alienated him from the present.

His tricky relationship to time

left him in a world of his own device.

[♪]

Gonzalo's body and mind occupied separate spaces.

From his loft, Gonzalo's thoughts may have been caught up

in an ancient Latin grammatical riddle,

or a 5000-year-old Egyptian plumbing technique,

or a 17th Century architectural quandary.

Yet, Fonseca's training and practice

were rooted in 20th-century modernism.

Gonzalo fluently drew from

an intimate engagement with history and myth.

In conversation, he mixed the many languages he spoke.

He held entire museum collections at his fingertips,

citing them piece by piece.

NARRATOR: Gonzalo was hungry to know the world,

but less than eager to be known by it.

Okay.

They didn't even meet yet, Mama and Papa. '55.

NARRATOR: Instead, Gonzalo preferred

to reveal himself through his work.

A jumble of clues that point to his varied preoccupations

and obsessions.

[♪]

[♪]

NARRATOR: Gonzalo's loft was a world apart from the city.

In its rooms, it could be any century.

He hand-built his living spaces like sculpture,

and sculptures divided rooms.

Dust from chiseled stone blanketed every surface.

Thousands of books piled high

lined the walls, with titles like:

The Plundered Past, The Survival of Pagan Gods,

A Mayan Grammar, Homeric Greek for Beginners,

Diary of a Seducer, Discourses of the Buddha,

A Platonic Labyrinth,

Artists of the Tundra and the Sea.

Gonzalo read voraciously,

alternating between book and chisel,

finding in an obscure passage, a clue.

The ignition to some new form,

the motivation for a play of shape.

Gonzalo made no distinction between work and life.

His sculptures were not product,

but process, a way of existing

between hand and mind, materiality and imagination.

Behind a hidden door adjacent to his bedroom

was a secret chamber.

Gonzalo called it the "Sancto Sanctorum."

[♪]

An encyclopedia of civilization and its traces,

spanning thousands of years,

originating from every corner of the globe.

From floor to ceiling,

Gonzalo arranged hundreds of artifacts:

Mycenaean and Maasai,

Egyptian and Cycladic, Inuit and Aboriginal,

Incan and Han.

Each object gestured to a world.

They stood for a deep and elusive realm

of myths, dreams, rites,

entire systems of thought, and practices of being.

[♪]

These objects carried a spirit

that Gonzalo replicated in his own work.

These artifacts were signs

of a universal vocabulary of humanity

from which Gonzalo drew his own artistic language.

That artistic language was hard-won

and not easily mastered.

It took Gonzalo over half of his life

to discover his voice in stone.

His was a language with an ancient grammar

and revolutionary conjugations.

To find his voice,

Gonzalo stepped outside of himself,

journeying as far as he could, reaching back through time.

It all started in Venice, on the Grand Canal

when 11-year-old Gonzalo declared to his family

that he would become an artist.

His sense of myth already evident,

it was in 1933 on a six-month trip to Europe with family

that Gonzalo felt the true weight of art

and the magnitude of history.

[♪]

For another boy, this artistic impulse

might have been a childish whim.

But Gonzalo returned home

to Montevideo, Uruguay, with a mission.

Right away, he transformed his family's basement

into a studio and began to work.

In a family of vibrant intellects and inventors,

Gonzalo stood out.

He was the rebellious artist.

Coming of age in Montevideo in the 1940s,

Gonzalo's mind roved widely,

far beyond the limits of his time and place.

At his Jesuit high school,

Gonzalo wrote a lengthy dissertation renouncing God.

At 17, Gonzalo encountered a man

who would shape his artistic destiny,

the firebrand modernist artist, Joaquin Torres-Garcia.

Torres-Garcia was already one

of the most influential artists of his generation.

Originally from Uruguay, he worked, experimented,

and exhibited with some of Europe's leading avant-gardes:

Theo van Doesburg, Piet Mondrian,

Hans Arp, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro.

Back in Uruguay, Torres-Garcia pursued an original

and all-encompassing language of art

based on elemental forms, signs and figures.

The goal was to use art to create, in his words:

"An abstract logic to the world."

Torres-Garcia called this

new artistic order Universal Constructivism.

Sleepy Montevideo became the epicenter of a new movement.

Gonzalo dropped his pursuit

of a university degree in architecture to jump aboard.

Gonzalo's father viewed Torres-Garcia as a radical,

an agitator who could be a dangerous influence.

As Gonzalo rejected

the bourgeois expectations of his family

in favor of his apprenticeship with Torres-Garcia,

the relationship between father and son frayed.

The growing tension erupted.

At a nightly family dinner,

Gonzalo's father mocked Torres-Garcia.

The 18-year-old Gonzalo stood up

from the dining table and walked out the door.

He did not speak to his father for the next 10 years.

Gonzalo forged his independence

by moving into an abandoned tower in a nearby park,

making the decrepit space his own.

It became the first of many reclaimed

and improvised studios.

From these primitive heights,

Gonzalo committed himself to a new

and explorative practice of art.

[♪]

The Taller Torres-Garcia was a laboratory

in which a group of young artists experimented

with a new formal vocabulary under the dogmatic leadership

of Joaquin Torres-Garcia.

One of the first students of the Taller,

Gonzalo was an active, though sometimes enigmatic, presence.

He prized the instruction of Torres-Garcia

and took naturally to the geometric possibilities

of the Taller's methods.

The use of pre-modern signs and pre-Columbian symbols

defined the Taller style.

Yet increasingly, Gonzalo felt constricted

by the limits of the artistic language

prescribed by Torres-Garcia.

He wanted to go deeper

and get to the core of the mysteries

and meaning behind the forms.

The death of Torres-Garcia in 1949 uprooted Gonzalo.

There was nothing left for him in Uruguay.

With no master to follow, already proficient

within the creative boundaries of Montevideo,

Gonzalo set out to track down the spirit

that animated his artistic impulses.

In 1950, in the dark of night,

with little more than the clothes on his back,

Gonzalo boarded a cargo ship

named the Tacoma bound for Europe.

Uruguay receded into the distance

as dreams of archaic glory,

distant gods, and mythic lands

carried the 28-year-old across the Atlantic.

[♪]

Camera in hand, documenting his travels

in photographs and sketches,

Gonzalo made his way through a world

he had studied and imagined for years.

As he moved through Sicily and Greece,

impressions washed over him.

In harbors, he sketched portraits

to pay his fare to the next destination.

He sailed to Crete,

and on to Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.

He found work on archeological digs.

He was brought to life by the hints and mysteries

pulled up from beneath the dirt.

He discovered how inert material

took sacred form.

He saw Petra and Palmyra.

A new sense of scale and proportion,

physical and temporal, electrified Gonzalo.

He made his way south to Egypt.

He traveled up the Nile, crossed the Nubian Desert,

and made it to Khartoum in Sudan.

Gonzalo contracted a virus in his eyes

and nearly went blind.

A doctor noticed Gonzalo sick in the streets

and nursed him back to health,

an intervention that saved the eyesight

of this budding artist.

Gonzalo studied and analyzed all he saw.

He scrutinized his reactions and sensations.

He contrasted ancient cultures with one another

and with the teaching of Torres-Garcia.

From Dandarah, he described a conversion of sorts:

"There was a tunnel going down a stairway,

"very long and lighted with candles.

"You could see figures and more figures,

"suns, forms of all sorts.

"I had a sensation close to the vertigo you feel

"when you are at a height

"and I suddenly thought that,

"as I was going down and continued underground,

"I was entering further inside that world.

"And that it wasn't art,

it was an initiation to a certain knowledge."

He had entered another realm.

Inside of him, myth merged with fresh observation,

antique forms took modern shape.

Torres-Garcia's influence receded

and Gonzalo's own spirit began to find its form.

Gonzalo was transformed by a new sense of scale,

that of a man measured alongside

the immensity of history.

[♪]

Gonzalo landed in Paris.

He painted on scraps of cardboard

and sketched with salvaged coal.

He often went days without eating.

He spent time in Madrid and Rome,

painting and practicing ceramics.

He exhibited work wherever and however he could.

He chased down archeological sites

with a vigorous curiosity.

His hands were always at one craft or another.

He was in pursuit of a vision just beginning to form.

In Uruguay, Gonzalo had been a student.

But these years overseas liberated Gonzalo.

Working in the shadows of antiquity,

he tasted creative freedom.

[♪]

Plans to travel to Japan

were derailed one afternoon at a café in Rome.

A lovely young American took a seat

next to Gonzalo in a café.

She carried flowers and wore a bright red dress.

"I'm also American," Gonzalo exclaimed:

"South American."

Her name was Elizabeth Kaplan,

and she was from New York.

Young, beautiful, and precocious,

she had come to Rome to pursue her work as a painter.

The two young artists fell quickly in love.

Within a year, the two married in Tangier.

Not incidentally, the couple's union inspired Gonzalo

to reunite with both of his parents

for the first time since leaving home at 18.

The young couple moved to Uruguay

and reconnected with Gonzalo's old colleagues and family.

Gonzalo had grown.

He was not the same man

who had left Uruguay six years prior.

Again, death pushed Gonzalo from Uruguay.

His oldest brother, Rodolfo,

at 36, a brilliant lawyer, wise beyond his years,

died unexpectedly of a heart condition.

Grief and a sense

that more awaited them beyond the horizon

that more awaited them beyond the horizon propelled Gonzalo and Elizabeth north.

propelled Gonzalo and Elizabeth north.

[♪]

It was the end of the 1950s, and New York thrummed

with the energy of the new world.

Within six years, Elizabeth and Gonzalo

had four children, Quina, Bruno, Caio, and Isabel.

He had an entirely new life and a young, glowing family.

DE TORRES: He arrived in New York.

He looked outside the window,

and you could see all the windows open

and what people were doing in their homes.

And he says, "Everybody was painting."

[CHUCKLING] So he says, "Painting should be--

Should be forbidden under-- Under penalty of death."

"If you painted, you risked death penalty."

So you had to be so committed and so brave

to paint that you risk being, you know, killed.

I mean, those are incredible thoughts.

He always had these--

These ideas that were very extreme,

very radical, but incredibly original.

So that made him so fascinating.

NARRATOR: Beginning in the 1960s,

Gonzalo's work evolved dramatically and rapidly.

In New York, Gonzalo discovered,

as he put it, "An orgy of materials."

Wood, plaster, clay, and cement supplanted paint on canvas.

He played with texture

and experimented with three-dimensional work.

It was no longer possible

to simply call Gonzalo a painter.

His time in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa

freed Gonzalo from the constraints

of his early training.

New York freed Gonzalo from tradition altogether.

[♪]

Gonzalo worked on commissions

for playgrounds and public projects.

He found himself building on an architectural scale.

He was moving very quickly.

The impulse to build followed Gonzalo everywhere.

Even a family outing to the beach

became creative territory,

a place to make dreamlands.

This period of time was marked

by joyful experimentation and artistic growth.

But as an artist, Gonzalo was seeking something

that eluded him in playgrounds and sandcastles.

His eye for form and sense of myth

was not yet satisfied.

His keen intellect, ever roaming, needed more.

[♪]

Gonzalo's notebooks evidence a vigorous mind

engrossed in study and play.

In them, he tested ideas and sketched possibilities.

He mapped winds and parsed words

to their deepest roots.

Inventions and riddles,

and the wisdom of thousands of years jostle the pages.

Gonzalo's art conversed with voices

that echoed through millennia.

By the end of the 1960s,

Gonzalo's interest in discrete forms had given way

to the construction of entire worlds.

His work, like his thinking, was becoming monumental.

The themes and structures

that had taken hold of Gonzalo's practice

required a medium that could express

their anachronistic force

and their expanding dimension.

What Gonzalo needed was stone.

[♪]

It took a 200-million-year metamorphosis

to form the marble-rich mountains of northern Tuscany.

For the past 2000 years,

men have pried apart these hills

to release giant blocks of stone.

In 1968, Gonzalo first visited Seravezza

and the nearby quarries

above Pietrasanta, Querceta, and Carrara,

epicenters of stone sculpture,

the source of perfect statuary marble.

He fell naturally into this world of artists, artisans,

stonemasons, and quarrymen all working in concert,

practicing techniques

that dated back to the Roman age,

living off of a local material so coveted

that Michelangelo himself

established his own quarry here.

Gonzalo discovered a shepherd's house built in 1678,

which he promptly bought

and named the "Loghetto," the Little Place.

Stone walls teetering on a mountainside

with an abandoned quarry as a backyard.

It was perfect.

The Loghetto became Gonzalo's newest laboratory.

[♪]

[CHISEL WHIRRING]

[♪]

NARRATOR: With stone, Gonzalo practiced magic.

He chose a block of stone

for its character and then developed it,

carving suggestive niches, elaborating a playful scale,

striking a balance between raw shape

and subtle human intervention.

Gonzalo discovered entire worlds

within a block of stone, no matter its size.

In the Loghetto's solitude,

with the perspective drawn from these ancient hills,

Gonzalo invented an artistic language.

[♪]

Gonzalo wanted to create a playful absence,

stone that could be read like a sentence without vowels,

only enough context to suggest definition.

He crafted sparse structures in whose spaces

entire histories could be glimpsed.

He loved turning inert rock into a world unto itself.

Gonzalo worked stone differently

than the community of sculptors who congregated in Seravezza.

Self-taught, his tactics ranged from masterful to primitive.

He never sought finesse or a delicate rendering.

He preferred a rough, rudimentary approach.

He never relied on assistants or artisans.

He always worked the stone on his own.

The process of constructing was a captivating game.

"You have to make the lock,

and then make the key," he would say.

Each stone was a puzzle,

a balance of proportion, scale, and angle.

An interplay of form, shape, and size.

An invitation to imagine, reference,

and travel through time.

Because of the towering quarries,

the ancient tradition, and artistic infrastructure,

working stone in Italy

meant working stone on the largest scale

and Gonzalo experimented widely.

The Loghetto was a private empire,

a place out of time where Gonzalo labored

in joyful solitude, entirely dedicated to his vision.

Free to execute work on a monumental scale,

he gathered stones around him,

displaying them for the wind and stars,

letting them play against one another.

He would spend half of every year here in Italy,

an annual counterbalance to his life in New York.

He sculpted for himself

according to interior laws and whims.

This was Gonzalo's soulful kingdom,

echoing with his language and graced with his monuments.

[♪]

[HAMMER STRIKING]

If you go to Italy,

you run into a lot of very, ahem,

serious sculptors there, looking for the perfect

block of solid white statuary,

or they'll be looking for something

that's completely faultless and cubed up.

And, you know, Gonzalo was always

looking for stuff that already had a life,

which is usually referred to as junk.

But he would look for stuff that had a patina,

that already had some time on it. And, um...

Uh... And then refine or un-refine it

to fit his own narrative.

[♪]

NARRATOR: Back in New York,

far from the stone-rich Italian mountains,

Gonzalo used the metropolis as his own personal quarry.

His friends and children scoured the city

in search of construction or demolition sites.

Gonzalo would buy,

or often steal in the dark of night,

old cornerstones, frontispieces,

and discarded masonry of limestone or brownstone.

In the dark of night, he and his co-conspirators

would wheel these scavenged stones

through the city streets back to his studio.

The work Gonzalo produced in Manhattan

was literally of the city itself.

Gonzalo gave himself fully to his studies,

to his thinking and reading, and to his carving.

His practice required a determined focus

that left him distant, sometimes inaccessible.

ELENA: I remember one day, he said, "Who is an artist?

An artist is somebody who dedicates

their entire life to do this.

Not an amateur, a weekend painter is not an artist.

A weekend artist is not a real artist.

Whatever they do, could be good or bad,

but an artist is if he dedicates his life to do this."

He didn't change his art, his life of art,

whatever happened.

Maybe it's a good thing, or not so good for his family

because he was not a perfect father.

But he knew his time was not eternal.

And even when he was young, you know,

he said, "I have to work. I have to work.

I can't spend a moment of my life without doing this."

And he did it, he did until the last day.

NARRATOR: Gonzalo's single-mindedness,

his devotion to his vision and his work,

left little room for much else.

His artistic pursuits made marriage difficult

and family life strained.

[♪]

In 1974, he and Elizabeth separated,

and Gonzalo drifted off into his own world.

He moved to the loft on Great Jones Street

in Manhattan's East Village.

The apartment, with its dusty studio

and hidden Sancto Sanctorum,

was a private space, his own universe.

It was there, working alone,

that Gonzalo labored to master his vision,

to give it wholeness and depth.

His vision only blossomed with time, reflection,

and, increasingly, with solitude.

Visions flooded his mind.

Gonzalo's inner and outer worlds

offered a bazaar of forms.

Characters, shapes, ruins half-imagined, half-referenced,

merged into creations wholly his own.

[MAN CHANTING INDISTINCTLY]

CAIO: Yeah, but there's no perfect translation in the end.

DE REGGI: Enigmas were-- You know, he made

all these pieces full of crypts, you know.

The crypt for him, you know,

Egypt with all the tombs that you have to go down.

That fact that you had, like, asarcophage,you know.

How many times he madesarcophage,

something which was buried, something which was hidden,

something which was--

You need to open it up to see it, you know.

How many pieces he made with the thing

that you could actually, "Oh." You know, discover.

So mystery.

He would dig in, you know. And then enigma.

Yeah, enigma. How did they do that?

[♪]

[♪]

HART: I mean, legacy is such a bizarre combination

of different kinds of luck, you know,

and the right things happening at the right time.

And sometimes it's the market, sometimes it's one critic,

sometimes it doesn't happen at all in a lifetime.

There's just no telling how or why

or when or where somebody will connect with enough of us

in the so-called "art world" that they make an impact,

and somehow, they get affixed in the firmament

in a meaningful way.

There was a general awareness.

It was a name at least you knew. Gonzalo Fonseca.

Um, you know... Again, he wasn't a hermit.

He was friends with people in the art world.

He knew people in the art world and other artists.

Um, I think people were generally aware of him.

But I don't think there was

a widespread understanding of his work.

He's not a good figure illustration

in any one of the standard canonical texts

about this-ism to that-ism to that-ism.

No, he's something else.

[♪]

NARRATOR: Gonzalo sat quietly outside the art world,

but stood firmly at the center of his own creative universe.

He labored tirelessly and accomplished much.

In 1968, Gonzalo was commissioned

to build a public artwork

for the Olympic Games in Mexico City.

He designed a tower,

a 36-foot-tall concrete structure,

a whimsical display of his work on a truly monumental scale.

He participated in art shows

and had his own work displayed in museums and exhibitions

in the U.S., Brazil, Venezuela, Spain, Italy.

Jorge Luis Borges and Marcel Duchamp

were dinner guests in his home.

He knew Louise Bourgeois, remembered Franz Kline

as a "simple man, like his paintings,"

and recalled that de Kooning

was "very demanding on the girls."

Gonzalo and Isamu Noguchi became close

while working at the same stone yard in Italy.

Kindred spirits, both quite solitary.

Yet, as his vision grew more distinct,

so did the contrast between Gonzalo and the art world.

Increasingly, he loathed its fanfare and artifice.

Gonzalo seemed to empathize

with a quote from Marcel Duchamp

who wrote that, "The more I live among artists,

"the more I'm convinced that they're fakes

"from the moment they get to be successful

in the smallest way."

Gonzalo believed in an art made for its own sake,

and he felt increasingly alone in its pursuit.

He wrote that his colleagues from Uruguay

could only judge his work

by the 1940s standards of the Taller,

that friends and fellow artists in Italy

were too involved in the work and its production

to have any real perspective, and that in New York,

he could not share his anxieties

and concerns with anyone.

"You have to rely on yourself only," wrote Gonzalo.

"I guess you build your own amphitheater

"with your own public in yourself,

and then dialogue with them, still inside yourself."

Despite his feelings of isolation

and his misgivings about the art world,

he persisted, confident in his practice,

buoyed by the serious artists that he admired

and the history that he brought forth.

In 1990, Gonzalo represented Uruguay

at the Venice Biennale.

Despite the great honor,

Gonzalo remained more content

making work than showing it.

He was always uneasy in a gallery,

put off by the crowds and formalities.

He would often say that an artist should be judged

by the numbers of exhibitions he declines.

A man apart, he was most himself

in a stone yard, with a chisel in hand.

Or in his quarry, his work's truest setting,

his amphitheater.

Gonzalo was never done.

His sculptures existed

in a state of slow, meticulous change.

It was only when a piece left his studio

that it was truly finished.

He therefore kept most works around,

watching their textures change and erode,

and the ground become firm under their weight.

CAIO: My father, especially in the last 10 or 15 years,

receded from exhibiting to some degree.

His relationship with selling his work was curious

in that he wanted to make

the minimum amount of money to keep going.

Um, and this was not an affectation of his.

I think it was his way, in some way,

of just rejecting

a kind of commercial aspect, and also a kind of sense

that the honor and the rightness

of what he was doing should ultimately...prevail.

Or that it was expression of his faith in that process.

But he very much was,

and he said he was, you know, a studio artist.

That's where he lived and breathed.

And he was not out there

as a promoter for himself. He was...

a working artist. And he sort of had this

right-or-wrong, old-school-or-not view

that the work would ultimately, whatever virtues it had,

would speak for itself.

Certainly, in his later years, I think he...

[♪]

You know, he said to me

that, you know, some artists want money or fame,

or any other thing,

but he was certain he wanted time.

NARRATOR: Time.

Time to continue digging through the world.

Time to continue to refine his vision,

to simplify his expression.

Time to watch age wear down his sculptures,

to break his stones into even smaller,

even more evocative fragments.

Or maybe just time to keep working.

Time defined his work.

So much of what Gonzalo loved bore the scars of time,

the patina of age.

He loved ruins and sites or objects

whose incomplete, broken-up form

required the imagination to fill in the backstory.

Gonzalo put his faith in time.

He wrote of his admiration for Franz Schubert,

for his brilliance and his poverty.

As Gonzalo had it, Schubert could not afford a piano

and never heard his last piece, "The Quintet in C,"

which he wrote just before his death.

"None of his friends," wrote Gonzalo,

"made any effort to advance his cause.

"None attempted to raise him from the bleak obscurity

"which he accepted with such gentle

"and undemanding complacency.

"Surely they cannot have sensed

"that a man of Schubert's phenomenal humility

could not be trusted to promote his own success."

CAIO: It looks good in the sun.

ISABEL: He just didn't have time for it.

I really feel that he felt under pressure with time.

He had a lot of work that he wanted to do,

and it took a long time to do it by himself with a chisel.

You know, it took a long time.

It's funny, he cared about immortality.

I mean, he cared about sort of the true, uh, art world,

if you will, that his work would be of lasting significance.

Of course he cared about that,

and I think any artist who's serious cares about that.

He made the decision, later on especially,

that he just wasn't going to use his time for that.

He wasn't-- He just--

He was gonna do the thing no one else could do,

which was to make the work.

[MAN SINGING IN ITALIAN]

[♪]

NARRATOR: Man first used stone to craft rudimentary tools

and weapons millions of years ago.

Temples were built of stone.

Pyramids.

Entire empires.

Somewhere along the way, man made art out of stone.

Sculpture.

Stone as symbol.

Humans have spent millennia cutting shape out of stone,

using their hands to rend meaning out of rock.

Gonzalo gloried in this tradition,

in the work it required and all it stood for.

He made that tradition his own.

[CHISEL WHIRRING]

By the end of his life,

Gonzalo embodied the very meaning of stone.

In Jefferson's monument, there's no tomb there

but it's a monument tomb.

[SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY]

NARRATOR: Gonzalo trusted in an afterlife.

He trusted that what he left behind would outlast him.

He took care to make the most of his time alive,

a stretch of days whose span

he knew to be minuscule in the scale of eternity.

Gonzalo revered vessels that shuttled one

from here to the afterlife and back again.

He knew that we moved through a world occupied by the dead,

an ever-layering accumulation of the past.

He dug through these layers.

He searched for the deepest veins.

He sought gems amongst the strata.

He journeyed through life by looking to the dead,

by learning from those long passed,

by seeking beauty and mystery and truth

in the clues and fragments left behind.

It was death that brought Gonzalo

to stone in the first place.

In 1964, Gonzalo made a headstone

for the grave of a friend

which the Queens cemetery rejected.

It was Gonzalo's first stone, Membra Disjecta.

Of the many deaths that pushed Gonzalo

in one direction or another over the course of his life,

the death of his oldest son, Bruno, in 1994,

wounded him most profoundly.

A brilliant painter himself, Bruno died at 36.

For Gonzalo, there were no pieces

he could pick up and reassemble in the wake

of the loss of his own child in his own lifetime.

It was a heartbreaking confirmation

of Gonzalo's own anxiety about time.

Without the body, it's called a cenotaph.

[SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY]

CAIO: Recorded for all time.

These were the first...

DE REGGI: One of his daughters told me once:

"Oh... He did what he wanted."

At the end, um,

he's a man that showed

some kind, a certain pursuing, you know, a certain...

You know, the steadiness.

The fact that in the spring, he would come.

In the fall, he would go, you know.

This kind of, uh...

The vision I have of Gonzalo is a man that, uh...

had found a certain balance, you know. And, uh...

And search was his main friend, you know.

He was a man of search.

[♪]

NARRATOR: In June of 1997, Gonzalo flew from New York to Italy.

He kissed the tarmac upon his arrival in Pisa.

As he was driven home from the airport,

he quietly commented on favorite sites along the route.

At home, exhausted, Gonzalo went to bed early.

When he noticed his bedside reading light had broken,

he declared to the house's caretaker:

"That's how I wanna go out. Like a light bulb."

By the next morning, Gonzalo was dead.

A peculiar knowingness surrounded Gonzalo's passing.

A neighbor mentioned being visited

by Gonzalo in a dream that night

only to wake to news of his death.

Another friend described a swarm of fireflies

around the Loghetto that same evening.

He had long told friends and family members

that he wanted to be buried in Seravezza,

laid to rest beside carvers and quarrymen

in the shadow of those great hills.

[♪]

CAIO: Stone is just stone.

You find a lump of stone on the street,

and it is what it is.

When you look at a piece of stone

in a demolition and you look at one of my father's sculptures,

you wonder what has to have happened

for that piece to suddenly no longer just be a lump of stone

and have a kind of

wonderful, artistic incantation about it.

And that is an alchemy that he invented and he executed.

And I think that's-- He really lived for that.

And it's all there in his work.

And when he told me:

"Don't worry about expressing yourself.

Your entire personality

and everything will be in your work."

And it really is such a true statement,

at least in his case.

NARRATOR: Gonzalo Fonseca's life recedes further into the past.

Whether his work will be excavated, exhumed,

dusted off and reassembled remains an open question.

Will it be brought back into the present,

beautiful evidence of something once great?

Will his work be lit by gallery lights or covered in vines?

Will future generations take stock of his vision

and make use of that wisdom?

Or will his stones sink back into the soil?

Gonzalo would have embraced any of time's whims.

Any outcome.

Any fate.

[♪]

[MAN SINGING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE]

[WOMAN ULULATING]

[WOMAN ULULATING]