Urban Sculpture Project
One sculpture in the street is one step in culture
The aim of the Urban Sculpture project is to put the sculpture on the streets, to bring people closer to art, to make cities a little bit more human, to open ways of discussion. Culture should be accessible to the general public rather than confined to elitist structures.
Art at the hands of the people, so it can be touched and felt and lived and not as something alien. But for this, we need institutions to get involved; local authorities, urban planning departments, town halls, private and public institutions, private foundations and anybody that is interested in opening art to the people.
Sculptures should be outside and not in museums, sculptures should be able to be touched and felt. Sculptures should form part of the environment.
Culture doesn't arrive easily to the normal public. Culture is something in which investment is needed and time and patience to see results, while still investing. Culture is something that needs to be insisted at every moment.
Cities need to have these elements of culture to progress.
The Work
The base where all the work unfolds is the human figure, the way in which it is expressed, the movements and how it relates to the environment, and the confrontation between it and the environment that ends in violence, repression and cruelty of power against the people, repeated cyclically in history. The human figure is the common thread where isolation and loneliness appear, and also the lack of dialogue and the misunderstanding that are recurring themes.

As for the work done, the theme varies constantly between values of decomposition, movement and loneliness in a moment of personal confinement to movement and exercise to fight against the stagnation caused by the pandemic. Expressed, through the years, in different states of abstraction and in different ways of relating to others.

Being everything done during these past years seen as a global prototype, in different levels of development, still the work has not arrived to be what it should be and located where it should be, in the dimensions that should be, being closer to the viewer, sharing a common space, in a mutual communication. The architect hidden behind the sculptor sees the sculpture as an urban element and needing to give all the creativity that has been coming out a purpose to be used and shared by the viewer. The work done has no sense as a decorative object left on a shelf; it needs to be out sharing time and space with the viewer.

Urban sculpture is also an element of transformation of the social structure by not complying with social norms and rules. It has to be an element to open minds and give new perspectives. Urban sculpture is a transformative element that forces us to rethink the world around us. It can be aggressive or settled but it always has an important social burden of denouncing injustices in the world. It is never complacent, but needs to be close to the viewer to provide support in difficult moments, fighting against injustice and confronting the problems of the environment.

Art Base

Born in Chile, began family arts craft business and studies on architecture; moved in 1976 to Barcelona/Spain; worked as industrial designer for 30 years mixed with graphic designer/image consultant, home renovation and development of website for tourist apartment.

In 2014, looked back to the arts craft workshop and decided to pick up back sculpture.
For a first step and experimentally, decided to use the materials that could be more related to his previous work as designer, and with which he could work more easily; cardboard and recycled cardboard boxes, some pieces of wood, normal glue and different types of painting, adding also Tetra Brik boxes or dust marble as finishes. It must be said that all very cheap materials have allowed him to work intensely through the years without having to be in financial trouble.

Working all this time manually with basic tools and recycled materials has been an interesting exercise at the level of practice and development. This has served to highlight the meaning and importance of learning in the manual trades of artisan work in an industrialized world; in turn recovering in some way the organization of the work learned from an early age in the artisan workshop with the family, the importance of the arts and crafts.

The concept of Arte Povera is linked to the base of the work carried out with the use of very basic materials and tools and also to the concept of Minimalism, trying to simplify the figure as much as possible to achieve a forceful expression with minimal elements. The work carried out is completely defined by these two bases adding Brutalism and Minimalism due to the expressive violence that the works, reduced to their minimum expression, manage to take from the creative base of their interior. The simpler the figure, the cruder is the reality it expresses, without traps or veils. The idea of going to base removing everything that could be superfluous has been a constant in his work, getting to an extreme in recent series where bare cardboard is the only material used for the work. Rationalism appears also, as nothing that has been done is improvised; the different stages have come organized to be able to build over them the following steps.

Within all these Concepts the human being appears in the center of the work; and seems necessary also to integrate the work done into urban projects and developments. Sculptures are not to be seen at a distance but need to be close to people. The emotions that a sculpture may have should be transmitted directly to the viewer and the viewer should be in contact with the work, should be able to touch it and to share time, space and emotions. The feeling is that the work should be understood like an urban element that needs to have its own space. Each work should have its space, but not any work should be used in all spaces.
In the end, the architectural mentality forged during the studies forces the sculptures to be in open spaces to share emotions with people passing by. The communion and interaction between the spectator and the Sculpture becomes more important in the elaboration process and what at first could have been a more frivolous situation, with the passage of time it becomes more important and ends up being what integrates all the studies carried out. in the previous years; and the work that comes out is an Urban element that needs to have a direct relationship with the human being in front of it.

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