Brainless
Man is a part of nature, even in his most degenerate and civilized form. A human being will always be a piece of nature. And it is for this reason that his modes of expression must also be at one with the way nature and matter expresses itself.
A head carved from honey-toned wood around a burl, the zone where the fibre coils on itself and gathers knots and cavities. The eye sockets are two dark hollows, one nearly round, one star-shaped; the mouth gapes low in the volume; from the crown rises a hollowed horn that breaks the skull's symmetry. The whole rests on a section of log with its bark left on. The figure was already latent in the swelling of the tree; the carving freed it without smoothing it. At certain angles the reading dissolves and the head returns to a block, which may be its strength.
One possible reading: a ritual object in which material precedes figure. Brâncuși sought the essential outline; the gesture here is the inverse, keep everything, smooth nothing, trust the gaze to learn to see.