Cinco mans dereitas ou parábola da firmeza

Olmo e ferro

150 x 35 x 40 cm c/u

1998

Stop telling stories, watch the carvings! josÉ paz

The setting, the coast: The Coast of Death

The sea is rough. It is sunny, but it does not feel warm at all. From my vantage point, the zigzaging, oblique white lines drawn by the waves look so tiny. Days like this make the little fishing boats’ efforts to arrive at the coast and unload almost impossible. I can certify that their fish is high quality, indeed. This is Fisterra, the world’s end. I am walking near the lighthouse, the same place where pilgrims get rid of the clothes they used in the Road to Santiago. From such a high site I can notice the harshness of the sailors’ trade, especially in days when sensible people take shelter in calmer places.

The Coast of Death, this earthly paradise, is nowadays losing its natural beauty granted by God -and that is a huge loss- because of private interests that are going to spoil this land’s identity. In my way to the sculptor’s studio, I stop at the cementery designed by César Portela for the rest of the sailors’ remains while their souls look for better places. It is still empty, nobody wants to use it as their last resting place. It is obvious, the beauty of this building does not fit with the mortuary culture of this area. Right now it is been used as a very appealing tourist attraction. Don’t be surprised if vulgar bungalows are built here in a few years.

Meet the sculptor

Álvaro de la Vega is a tall, strong man with vigorous hands hardened by the handicrafts. When you feel hands like these you are able to understand the judges’ metaphor ‘the long arm of law will prosecute the delinquents’. I suddenly also understand the presence of those five giant hands –with painted veins to emulate the blood circulation- in a room filled with many other wooden shapes that silently await for I don’t know what. I find in this room a kind but nervous man, with a serious expression, as if he was intrigued by questions beyond the usual concerns. His sincere eyes, profound and limpid, grant reliability. He has the firm and determined walk of those who are used to fight against life. Nevertheless, under that rough appearance, I discover a sensitive man, committed to his environment. Common sense tells us to be on good terms with nature, as it is the space where we live.

We go through the doorway of his cabin in Corcubión, a seabord town. It is a modern studio, with four levels and wide windows. His wooden children, spread on the floor, give the room an unreal atmosphere. The zenithal natural light prevents me to see these shapes fully alive, but I am certain that at midnight they come back to life. The floor reminds me of a carpenter’s workshop, the tools and the rests of shattered wood warm up the room. It is true what they say about the wood’s warmness, even when it is only rubble and sawdust.

Meet the work

Unaware of the most contemporary aesthetic trends, this sculptor’s woodcrafts are surprisingly expressive. This is an author that carves the wood avoiding the object stylization of certain nowadays sculptures. His wood does not hide its origin: the tree. Wounded wood from hundred-year-old trunks, showing its hardness. Wood roughly carved, always refering to the material that contains it and making a minimal concession to colour, only to highlight certain parts of the shape. When you say that something is roughly finished you mean that it is badly made or finished, but that is not the case of Álvaro’s works, who ‘creates an art bound to the earth, a verbal stream that comes from the people and speaks with the hands. I use the axe because it is my favourite tool, it gives rhythm and cadence to the carving’.

After the path followed by contemporary sculpture along the 20^th century, where art chose the object dissolution and trends nowadays consolidated appeared –such as installations, sculpture assemblages, ephemeral interventions, etc.-, with the space and size transformations, the fragmentations and the different constructive materials, it is paradoxical that even these days this kind of sculpture coexists with direct wood carving, a primary art that goes back to ancient times. Judging by appearances, some people related his art to Leiro’s, but ‘when I started working in this kind of sculpture, I was expecting this mistaken comparison. If anyone connects me with Leiro, they do not understand my work, you can not confuse comedy and drama.’

Baudelaire said that sculpture is a rough and objective art, even more than nature itself. If we agree with this definition, probably Álvaro de la Vega’s art, with such a primary process, with such a dramatic and expressionist gestuality –‘anything with rhythm, with autographic quality, with capacity to be signed, will be like this’-, with such an unfinished appearance, will fit in this concept. Nevertheless, under the skin of those huge trunks, those suffering and reflective shapes, those rough pieces of iron that delimit the volume, shades of wire that stand as a metaphor for a surprising chiaroscuro, in which the axe scars are the only warm clothes against the cold night, we find an apparently unpolished work that combines everyday, subject-stylizing elements in a pop art revision where the artist tries to increase the communication with the audience. This all is useful for dealing with very elaborated, philosophical thoughts that are presented to us as ‘very real’.

Schopenhauer

When I look at these sculptural groups I just can think of the plastic arts’ healing characte and remember Schopenhauer’s tragic sense of life about human beings’ suffering when trying to fulfill permanently their material needs. He said that life is a struggle in which we must stand in a permanent state of desire and where we will only get rid of our human defects by means of contemplating art works. Life’s tragedy lies in the permanent existence near the suffering. The desire denial will not end with the life willing denial, and according to this philosopher the final solution lies in buddhist nirvana, the purest state of will denial. And so the sculptor, conscious of this tragic existence in himself, finally performs as a healer, using art as a healing entity with which we can give free rein to our anguishes to get rid of them, a way to fight against them, to free ourselves from our painful travel through the world.

Clues

Stress, mass, vertical lines, reflection, sensitive experience, thought, nihilism, pessimism, anguish, doubt, search, anxiety, spirituality, jail, alienation, collective body, existentialism. This is a suffering artist. His introspective, tortured character is finally spread to his work, as an extension of himself, ‘is there any artist who is not tortured?’

He is not in favour of performances, they are always dangerous for him. But he likes sculptures with an inner space, as for him this space shapes us. On the other hand he also gives importance to spaces’ external architecture, ‘basic for the ideas that take place in the border line, in order to achieve the naked idea from a complex concept, it is more interesting the space than the narration’. It is also important the architectural environment where these ideas are developed.

Despite the apparent naïveté and empathy that we may receive from these works, the sculptor does not want to restore the appearance of reality but the presence of the works. But those presences refuse any kind of representation, because we are dealing with transcendental facts, presences as cathegories of thoughts –the human being as the container of the thought’s infinite space-, of fragility, of self-destructive mechanism. The essence flourishes in the sign, which means but is not interested in complicating too much the story and in avoiding the audience’s approach. ‘I am interested in creating an easy doorway. I am not interested in a passive audience, I do not like complicating the first read line. We can notice long-term works, inspired by the medieval symbolic animalistics, and a certain character representing sacred art in the Romanic retables he likes to carve. These shapes are presented from the distance, the strangeness, as in the case of the four giant hands hanged on the wall, that inspire intelligences strange to the human being. This author also likes to pay a tribute to the history of art and so his horses emulate Géricault’s, and his bulls emulate Guisando’s. Another part of his work, the tragic-looking beings, are influenced by one of the 80’s artistic constants: the importance of the human body from every point of view, from illness to sexual identity questions and aspects related to beauty. These constants had to do with the involution or revival of figurativism and pop-related arts.

Besides the imperfect finish, our attention is attracted to the works by the outer visibility of certain materials such as glue, impurity remains from the iron casting, sand mixed with asphalt, the wires and tighteners necessary for securing the shapes, and also the vertical lines that split some sculptures in two pieces. It is also appealing the fact that many works are facing the walls, as a reminder of the tragic sense of existence. This line of thought is shown under a figurative and recognizable appearance, but abstract at heart, in a work not very far from conceptualism. In this ‘intellectual’ impulse the audience must try to understand the work beyond the visible elements. This author does not try to filtrate his learning period as an excess of information, ‘I do not want to overload the sculpture. Nowadays we are living a very mediatized art, and the information vitiates the art. I am interested in the audience perceiving closeness’.

This work is conditioned by the sketchs, ‘the initial stage of any work is very important, even when the final stage is the most valued’. As if they were sketches, the third dimension, the chiaroscuro is applied to the sculptures, and so the wooden shapes cast wire-designed –for instance, in the ‘Contemplación’ series-, an other obsession. In the course of time, as a result of an erasing process in order to focus the stare at basic and familiar lines only, Álvaro’s sculptures are more undressed. This is noticeable in the ‘Emerxencia’ series, where there are angels hanging from the ceiling with their wings in their hands, in a true demythification process, and also in that couple, a man and a woman both in their underwear, whose pedestal is an uncarved trunk. The audience will find all these questions that, connected to astonishment, will make them fall into the poetry, which is ‘the purpose of any artistic creation, the art’s capacity to carry the audience to unknown exploration areas’. All these questions related to intuition will guide them to the frontier, to the transcendency only reached through the art. As in this case, where starting always from the sketches, ‘the first doodles, purification process and return to the sketch’, veiled and insinuated shapes will appear from the core of those formless trunks, from the chaos; they will be released from the substance that forms them to reach the body, the body as an abstract entity that contains the truly important things.

Epilogue

In a society so aloof from existential questions, in which every time is harder to find a place for introspection, de la Vega’s work is ‘structured not from metaphors but from similes, where all is near, relating things by means of mimesis, a basic form of language, in an attemp to make the audience notice the closeness’. A space dedicated to reflection in such a deaf and frivolous world. Maybe this work is about that, about approaching what is still authentic in the human being; that is why the author tries to approach him, to prepare an apparent envelope in contact with our surroundings, a space where to expiate this society’s evils and where to feel safe from it. Lacan said that ‘an obsessive person is the one who is all the time wondering if he is dead or alive. He is not only horrified with his own desire but specially with the Other’s, so he tries to get rid of the desiring Other, and he does so by adopting his place. The only way to be safe from aggressions is to build these spaces, these apparent beings with whom to get into contact with the surrounding reality, and so to be safe from the consequences of the frenetic future. With the Other’s death, he expects to be free to live. But as new rules are imposed continuously, the obsessive person becomes a living dead’. And these bodies are coffins with which to confront death, thoughts about life full of anguish, spirituality, obsession and fear. They are a way to reach divinity through oneself, to look for order inside the chaos. That is why Álvaro’s faces, as characters from medieval retables, fragments, hands, they remember us that we are just a part of the biological sequencing. Let’s keep ourselves safe, let’s exorcise the bad omens. Let’s die to be reborn by studing the buddhist tradition -according to Schopenhauer, the only one that is going to save us. Or let’s just enjoy the contemplation and the healing character of arts.

Stop telling stories, watch the carvings!