ANTONIO DÍAZ GARCÍA - ESCULTURAS

creators are titans. This is a rare conjunction of innocence, strength and the magic to be able to enlighten the subject by transcending it. And what is excellence in art? It is not being able to paint well or sculpt with a respectable style, but rather speaking clearly, with charm, with a particular style, regardless of what is deemed convenient. “It is good to discover that you are wrong every time you are right” intones the guitarist and producer Phil Manzanera “the magnificent”. The music of the forge, with its ancient, primeval feel, has been replaced by the noise of machines, but even so, sparks fly, there is the light of a fire that illuminates the skill of the subject handled by AD. The blows of hammer bend rigidity until they make iron a malleable element of nature, for Antonio Díaz’s sculpture is at once earth-bound and aerial. It has roots and flies; it is born from the ground, but takes off like a chrysalis, and he gives it wings to stay aloft like a dream with a vocation of eternity: mineral as a butterfly, ephemeral and immortal, that rises and remains aloft in the majesty of its weightlessness. Tall, strong, Manchego-Catalan, he smiles, lowers his head and carries on forward, for he hopes to arrive and achieve. He looks like a silken colossus, able to bend iron, amongst caresses and blows that shape. He has a sculptor’s harsh, callused hands; the mind of a builder of structures that wander and branch out like a “branches of rivers tattooed on the moon” as Pablo Neruda sang in his “Canto General”, under the aegis of his “Mollusca Gongorina” poem. He might seem crude, but he is strong, intense, tough, wild, gentle, tender, like a great oxymoron where fire and ice embrace, where light and darkness come together, salt and thirst meet, and desert and lush orchard combine. You see the man in the boina cap and don’t think of the artist – today the catch-all use of ‘artist’ has devalued the image of the builder of thought-provoking signs and forms. However, you talk to him and then everything changes, for there is no ‘character’; just a person, with neither disguises nor dilemmas, just the simplicity of a man with his feet on the ground, even if he is always trying to look to heaven. Patron and worker in one! His head gives the orders, but they pass through his heart, but before his hands can act, before the diastole that decides the hierarchy of this anarchical construction starts. And so he begins to feel forms unfamiliar to him, aerial structures that are born from the wind, but kneel on the ground. An earth-bound sculptor that longs to take off, recalling Neruda’s metaphor when he describes Miguel Hernández as having the “face of a recently dug-up potato”. The blacksmith that makes tools, objects and receptacles that bring progress, that contribute to the business of survival, makes his own progress giving flight to iron, twisting shoots, making elements that have no utility beyond serving the spirit. When he does that which he knows how to, it is not the same as when he does what he does not know how to do. This is the principle of art: to search in places we do not know. And this is a most difficult thing, but also most spellbinding. The best art is always an invention. As Bob Dylan said, “People don’t do what they believe in, they do what is most convenient and then regret it”. The diffident singer-poet could not be more right. Convenience rules all, but in such a way that creates erroneous ways of behaving. Man should do what he believes in for it will be his salvation, not in a religious way, but rather a soteriological way. Dylan himself affirms “Do what you want and you will be king”, because you should do that what you believe in; just as AD does when he seeks dragonflies in the red-hot iron, and honey and lavender in steel. AD’s is not a late vocation, but rather it is deep and ancient; something that has always been inside him. In his youth, he wanted to dedicate himself to art, but first he had to put food on the table; in post-war Spain some streets were paved in gold, but certainly not in La Mancha. He had to emigrate from his home town of Tomelloso to earn a wage, but there was not a day that passed without his dream of art not coming to him. Now, in his later years, he is obsessed by it, like an insatiable hunger. There is no merit in merely dreaming – although it should be an obligation; the value of being comes when one is able to bring these dreams to fruition, when one has the need to achieve. Fernando Pessoa says as much through his heteronym Álvaro de Campos in his noted poem “Tabacaria” from the 15th of January 1928: “ O mundo é para quem nasce para o conquistar/É não para quem sonha que pode conquistálo, ainda que tenha razão ” [The world is for those born to conquer it/It is not for those who dream they can conquer it, even if they are right]. At the presentation of his book “Le goût de vivre” [The Pleasure of Living] the French philosopher André Comte-Sponville states that “we have had to live in a disoriented society”(La Vanguardia, 11th April 2011), and this makes it even more difficult to orientate ourselves. When so many are out of synch, one who is in synch seems subversive. He who follows his own path, living and feeling as he pleases, whom nobody doubts, ends up being king. King of his own world, but that is the point; that which is his and his only transcends, thus becoming a shred of life that remains. To discuss AD is to debate art and work, and to write about sculpture itself. Talking about sculpture today is entering an unstable land, where obviousness, emptiness and the folly of generalisation reign. One has overused the concept, the crossbreeding of forms and the blurring of boundaries so much that now sculpture can be anything; not only things that have volume, but also the virtuality of the possibility of volume. I am not against novelty, nor talent, but I am against confusion. What is confusion? It is not the product of the imagination and a technique (as anomalous as the latter may seem), neither the discovery of intelligence, but rather incorrect identification, to mistake one concrete fact for another that has nothing to do with it. Facts cannot be changed, but their valuation can. This year is the 600th anniversary of the birth of Giorgio Vasari (1511-1573), artist, treatise writer, historical source par excellence; in “ Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori ”, his magnus opus, he writes: “the sculptor removes everything that is superfluous and reduces the material to the form that exists in the artist’s mind”. The old talk and divisions of sculpture are obsolete, but not sculpture itself, a Fine Art that consists of relating volume, space, time, material, intelligence, feeling, thought, pleasure and of course, beauty. Yes, beauty; the thrill of being able to read the sculptor’s thoughts. Sculpture is the steatopygian (large-buttocked) women of the Paleolithic, celtic torques, the proud horses of the Parthenon, the head of Antinous, the medieval gothic Christ figures, Michelangelo’s Slaves, the civil and religious figures of the Baroque, Picasso’s Woman with a Vase, Julio González’s Woman in a Mirror, Boccioni’s lost-wax casts, Ángel Ferrant’s hybrids, Jorge Vieira’s terracotta bulls, Henry Moore’s searches for hollow spaces, Jorge Oteiza’s macles, Chillida’s poetic tools, Plensa’s dainty pieces, or Alcántara’s carvings. And why are their works sculptures and not mere fetishistic objects or curios? Because they are creations that overlap volume, time, imagination, flight they orientate and define the space. The concept of the artist is articulated in the Renaissance, but they existed long before then. Although we barely know their names, we know that their system of production was different. The artist, a person who developed a technique in relation to a material, expressed a way of feeling and thinking through the materiality he shapes. Sculpture is not a decorative object, it is an material aphorism, a symbol that prolongs the being, with an ontological character. Without man there is no art, nor gods, nor myths, not anything. Man has constructed it all, and has destroyed a lot, but overall the balance is still positive. History of art proves this, the spirit that lives in the works of art that make up the tradition with all the variants one desires. And the tradition of art has nothing to do with popular, artisanal art. In the same way one cannot compare period pieces with works with an inherent time frame but that nevertheless are still contemporary. With a certain amount of overeagerness tribal, primitive or African art are spoken of as decorative forms that have volume but not transcendence, as if outside time and space. They are worthy, artisan products that do not transcend their own execution. Is there anything more decorative that African masks or its substitutes? No; I shall pair them with the geometric arts. Instead of getting up in arms about the topic, consider my reflection: a geometric work suits any space, just as a Senufo mask does. A sculpture does not. It is linked to its own provenance, immanence and determination: it transforms and consecrates a place, and is an embodiment of energy. Without wishing to make absurd comparisons, Julio González was a welder, a mechanic specialised in metals, like Manolo Torres and other masters who were all employed in large car workshops. AD, in the same way, has been shaped by his day-to-day work, in his forge- locksmith-workshop, accumulating knowledge about metal and its behaviour and as such is able to put questions to it, to dream about it, to grant it freedom or to redirect it down a path of artistic fertility. Sculpture gives meaning to