ANTONIO DÍAZ GARCÍA - ESCULTURAS

the material, turning it from passive to active, making it a participant in our reality. Art that does not come out of ontological necessity is, at its origin, weakened and exasperates its being. Man does that what is suitable, what is necessary, for that is what society requires and what the market imposes. Out of this comes the idea of a sense of utility and the reasons it is questioned, as if something that is useful in our society were unnecessary! But at some point in life, the sentient being man is, creative by nature, feels the need to do something else, to leave a memory of what was his path through life. This is rarely premeditated. One does not do things thinking about eternity, but rather about one’s own uniqueness, because we are all different Man wants to leave a trace of what he sees inside himself, invisible to others, of what he is, how he is, his raison d’être, and then gives it shape in a piece of art. For it to be art, it must transcend the mere material, signify space, create emotion and mystery in its fellow viewers These are the elements of sculpture, whether it is made of scenery, beige Colmenar limestone, threads of copper and iridescent DVDs, fluorescent tubes, Corten steel or plastic. In “Kunst and Literatur” (1803-1832), J.W. von Goethe states: “Anyone can see the material in front of them. The content can only be found by someone that has something to do with it.” The sculptor is the person in charge of making us see the content of the material that we can all see at first, but without his intervention we would not be able to enjoy. The class of sculptor that AD is rarely occurs twice. Today’s time and circumstances are different to those in which he lived and when his aspiration to art was born. In addition, today the vast majority of artists come from Fine Art schools, from a rhetorical, conceptualistic education that makes all students the same; it is an education does not allow for any other kind of adventure or help them to be free, libertines, with that touch of madness that every creator needs, just as Rimbaud recognised as a prerequisite for poets. Antonio Díaz, AD, comes from a practice of growing maturity that eventually explodes like dynamite more than gunpowder, which burns without noise or consequence. In one of Neil Young’s songs he sings “it’s better to burn out/ than fade away”, which is precisely what AD has done – he has thrown himself on the fire with no fire-proofing, preferring to burn himself rather than merely fade away. This is what all artists who value themselves should do; to not let themselves die before death overcomes them. In consequence, for all the reasons I have listed above, I name this man an artist, an innocent, a titan, wild and passionate. An innocent, not as an epitome of naïveté (even if he does have some of this), but rather as a frequenter of the states of innocence that creativity signifies, as a hunter of purity that brings security. An artist, because he transforms matter, combining time and immanence, implying Boethius’s nunc stand; that ‘now’ that exists, without which art would be something different. This idea is frivolous, like so much of what is created today; charmless ideas with no consistency. AD is wild in the sense of not being a part of any particular wave or current, yet in a desperate struggle to express his uniqueness and find the ideal flow of his power. Artist! Innocent! Titan! Wild! Passionate! At the inauguration of José Luis Sánchez’s first exhibition in Madrid (a harsh existence for a splendid oeuvre with few concessions), his master Ángel Ferrant wrote the following, borrowing Hegel: “Nothing of what is merely a repeated formula; nothing of what is or has been done without passion is art”. On the other hand, passion by itself is not enough for a work to be identified as art, but it is nevertheless difficult for that work to be created in the absence of passion. Being the liberal that I am, I admit reality as it stands, without falsifying facts, but nevertheless objecting to something that seems temporally inaccurate. I always try to understand the other persons’s view, but that is not to justify it in any way; I try to think that the other person may be more correct than me, and that they will have their reasons for this. As such, everyone is free to believe that what they do is art, just as I am free to believe that art is that which shakes me, moves me, fascinates me for various different reasons. Everyone has the right to do whatever they please, but when they compete with others, then one must choose and favour one thing over another; this is the difference between art and traditional craft, between the mundane and the sublime, the domestic and universal, the cultured and the ignorant, between entertainment (which is legitimate) and the intervention which becomes an epiphany. During my trip to Lleida, where I was able to meet Antonio Díaz and become familiar with his work, I read the work of Lleida-born poet Màrius Torres, out of both courtesy and pleasure, for the enjoyment of his poetry that belies a musical taste and a bitter life, with elegant, symbolist echoes. Torres speaks, with careful requirement, of forms, of abundant death, of life, like those sculptures; of melancholy, of the night of the vagrants “…we poor vagrants of the streets…”. I am one of those vagrants; we are all one of those beings that follow the path that makes up our life cycle. That poetry accompanied me and returned to me when contemplating the sculptures now found in a book by Luisa Noriega, an art critic who best knows the work of this sculptor with roots in both La Mancha and Lleida, for the enjoyment of the author and those people who believed in the sculptor as someone who unites both tangible and intangible matter. I do not know if what I have written above explains anything. At any rate, I am not trying to worship a creator, nor confuse the reader. The image of the critics’ profession is already damaged enough without making it any worse. The work of Antonio Díaz is clearly the result of both his professional and existential circumstances, and it has all of the defects, successes, shortcomings, riches and particularities that the sculptor has had along the length of his life. Nevertheless, it is not worth losing sleep over the lack of publications or bibliographies about AD; he has dedicated his life to non-artistic work and his vision has ended up postponed, but also neither cancelled nor buried, for in the end it has flourished. In a similar way, Màrius Torres did not live to see any of his books of poems published. Better late than never! This book is necessary, especially because it will bring its creator into the limelight, both for himself and for his followers and collectors. This cultural venture is about showing that Antonio Díaz is “made of gold and can’t be sold”, to bastardize the Jimi Hendrix song. AD is simply trying to display a life and a passion through iron sculpture. It is completely up to the spectator, or the art lover, to decide what is interesting about the work and how interesting it really is. And in the last instance, it is up to the sculptor to follow a path he has chosen, to modulate it, to change tack and to consolidate it according to his internal voice. There is a lot of rock in this work, and a rocker like Bruce Springsteen says “God have mercy on the man / Who doubts what he’s sure of”. Tomás Paredes President of the Spanish Art Critics’Association Dedications: I hope that your passion for art allows you to work hard and make the most of every day of your life and that it helps you in this constant process of learning and betterment that we all must follow in order to get out the best of everyone of us and to share it with others. Affectionately, Antonio López García I remember when I was still a sculpture student, Antonio Díaz spoke to me of iron, of the forge, the hammer, coal, of how one knew that the iron was the right temperature to be forged… Even today the joy with which he explained his experiences, the trade he had exercised, is still etched in my memory. Since then, I have always seen him as a sculptor. Although for a while I couldn’t see the joy of that past time in his eyes, I knew that deep inside him the forge was ready and he just needed a spark to light the fire and to bring his creation to the surface. That spark has arrived and now we can enjoy this creative explosion that has borne fruit in the shape of a majestic dialogue between the iron and a man who has respected, admired and worked with it for so many years. These sculptures are the product of a long relationship, of years of observation, work, and struggle; as such they are, as is to be expected, full of strength and force. The result proves that in art there is no time, but all good things come to those who wait. The dialogue between Antonio and iron is very special, and such is the connection that one and the other are the same, thus achieving an expressiveness that is rarely seen. In his hands iron seems malleable, light, and easily- worked, but we all know that this is not the case. It excites me when a sculptor attains a symbiosis with a material or a technique. Rodin managed it sculpting, Louise Bourgeois sewing