"Catacomb" Carved White Agate Skull Sculpture — L'Aquart × Luis Alberto Quispe Aparicio

A skull carved from natural white agate — its outer shell left as the stone was found, hollowed within to a buried family of its own. One of one.

The object

"Catacomb" is carved from a single mass of white agate from Tanzania. In a deliberate reversal of his usual method, Quispe Aparicio left the outer shell of the stone largely as it emerged from the ground — raw and matte — and turned the carving inward, so that the life of the piece happens beneath the surface, as if underground. It rests on an obsidian base with bronze skull accents.

The conceit

It is, in the artist's telling, a family portrait — mother, father and all the little ones gathered for one of those keepsake tableaus set out on a mantel or piano. The only difference is that this family keeps its togetherness on the wrong side of the grass: domestic life continued underground, rendered with a straight face and a buried smile.

The stone

Agate is a banded variety of chalcedony — microcrystalline quartz — formed as silica-bearing solutions line cavities in volcanic rock, band by band, over geological time. It registers close to 7 on the Mohs scale: hard enough to take crisp detail and a deep polish, and unforgiving of any slip, since nothing can be filled or reversed in solid quartz. The Tanzanian white gives the skull its pale, bone-true pallor — material and subject in agreement.

The series — Faces of Eternity

Few symbols carry the universal recognition or the suggestive charge of the skull: archetype and memento mori, relic and warning, calavera and battle trophy, the seat of personality and the face of eternity. "Faces of Eternity" is Quispe Aparicio's answer to that long iconography — a set of skulls, each carved from a different natural gemstone, given attitude and personality: a wink at mortality rather than a solemn bow to it. The concept took several years simply to gather rough of sufficient size, interest and integrity to carve, then a year at the bench, each skull requiring one to three months and its own hand-fabricated supporting metalwork. The completed collection toured the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) headquarters in Carlsbad, California; the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, in "Gem Artists of North America"; and the Lizzadro Museum of Lapidary Art in Illinois.

The artist

Luis Alberto Quispe Aparicio is a Peruvian-born lapidary sculptor and creative director of L'Aquart, heir to a family atelier whose tradition reaches back to 1968. An engineer by training, he gave the bench what engineering could not match; his carved works are held in museum collections worldwide, and since 2010 he has collaborated with S.T. Dupont on Haute Création pieces. His practice insists on harmony between lapidary carving, metalwork and structural planning — and on refusing difficulty as a reason not to proceed.

Offered by

Surround Art & Diamonds — North American representative of L'Aquart — presents this work as a singular object at the intersection of lapidary art, fine craft and collecting, with nearly a decade placing Quispe Aparicio's sculptures in private collections across the United States and Europe.

• Material: White agate (Tanzania); obsidian base; bronze skull accents
• Dimensions: 21 × 18 × 15 cm (8.3 × 7.1 × 5.9 in)
• Year: 2017
• Artwork origin: Peru
• Edition: Unique, one of one
• Status: In hand, available