MEET THE ARTIST
"Art is a language — and if you don't understand what is being said you will not be able to appreciate its actual depth."
Cecil Carpenter is a contemporary artist whose work is rooted in Neoplatonic philosophy — the tradition of Plato, Plotinus, and Proclus — a philosophy in which beauty is not decoration, but a path the soul takes toward the divine.
Born and raised in Lexington, Kentucky, Carpenter earned his BFA from the Columbus College of Art and Design in 2008, where he was awarded the Outstanding Senior in Fine Arts Award. His senior thesis, Designed Obsolescence — a nine-foot cast aluminum kinetic figure engineered to fail — was reviewed in The Columbus Dispatch and has been exhibited in several galleries across US including the Carnegie Center for the Arts.
Beyond his visual practice, Carpenter is also co-founder of the internationally recognized electronic music group Autograf.
"I believe people's lives and stories become etched in their portraits. I never use references when sculpting faces, and only rarely while drawing them, because I feel like I am channeling a story. I get into a flow state and before I realize what's happening someone is looking back at me."
What emerges is a body of work concerned not with likeness but with presence — faces that arrive rather than appear, figures that carry the weight of what they have witnessed.
Today, Cecil Carpenter lives and works in Sighișoara, Romania — a medieval city in Transylvania whose stone and silence have shaped the work.
"Art is the only real answer available — and it is available to all of us whether we understand its language or not."
INSPIRATION
"An artist would never create an imitation if they could create a reality."
Cecil Carpenter’s creative process is deeply rooted in the Neoplatonic concept of theurgy—an act of 'Divine-working'. For him, art is more than an expression; he believes that to create is to draw closer to divine essence itself.
Through sculpture and drawing, Cecil explores the relationship between creation and the Creator, seeing his work as a bridge to the universal forces that shape existence. His art serves as a meditation on form, emotion, and the spiritual essence that binds humanity to the divine.
While inspired by the philosophical traditions of Proclus, Iamblichus, and Julian, Cecil’s approach is deeply personal. For him, art is not just self-expression—it is a way to seek and reflect the presence of the Creator through the very act of creation. He believes that artistic expression is the purest way to engage with the sacred, the infinite, and the unknown.
To Cecil, creation itself is a divine act, an endless source of inspiration that mirrors the forces that once shaped the world—knowing that, in the moment of making, the Creator must have had similar thoughts.
PHILOSOPHY
"Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue... cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is shadowed... until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine."
— Plotinus, Enneads I.6.9
Cecil Carpenter’s kinetic sculpture, ‘Designed Obsolescence’ (or ‘Sue’), is a physical embodiment of this philosophy. Over the course of nine months of intense labor, he meticulously crafted Sue as part of his senior thesis at Columbus College of Art and Design, engineering it to function for exactly 10 years before ceasing movement—mirroring the finitude of human life.
"Death gives meaning to life," Cecil explains. "By giving a statue a predetermined lifespan, I wanted to explore the tension between the ‘immortality’ of sculpture and the inevitability of death. Just as a broken escalator becomes stairs, a broken machine becomes an eternal monument to its own existence. Similarly, our bodies are designed to fail, but in their final moments, they give birth to the immortality of the soul."
Much like Plotinus describes the sculptor chiseling away to reveal hidden beauty, 'Sue' once moved with purpose but now stands frozen, its stillness not a loss, but a transformation into permanence.
