ANTONIO DÍAZ GARCÍA - ESCULTURAS

There once was a boy called Antonio who lived in a town near Lleida called Tàrrega. There he lived in a little house with his parents, where in winter it was very cold and the wind rattled the shutters. Like every day he went to school, but before he got there, he liked to stop in blacksmith Manuel’s workshop, to see the forge’s fire burn. You could hear the incessant screeching of the trip-hammer and banging of hammers from the blacksmith’s all day long from the school. Although his classmates and teachers detested the noise, Antonio dreamt of being there. At breaktime he played football with his classmates, and he was the goalkeeper. While he was playing, he used to look as often as he could through a hole in an old wooden door behind the goal to watch the smith forge his metal. One day the ball landed in the smithy’s yard, and Antonio went in to fetch it. That day he met three friends called: forge, anvil and mallet, who said that if Antonio wanted to be their friend that he’d have to work with them. Antonio accepted the challenge and met them every day after school; he threw off his satchel and changed his blue-striped school overalls for leather ones. The boy secretly went to work with his new friends without his parents’ knowledge, for they didn’t want him to be friends with those three; they said they were bad for him because they burnt him, hit him and even scratched his hands and arms. But this best-kept of secrets soon became an open secret. His three friends came to transform the weak, innocent hands of a boy into the strong, robust hands of a man after many days and long nights together. On his twentieth birthday, Antonio had to leave for his military service and he knew that he would be apart from his dear friends for a long time, and since he couldn’t take the iron gate they had been working so hard on together with him, he decided to hide it in a hayloft, where it remained for a long time. When he returned from his service, the young man and his three inseparable friends dusted themselves off and finished the job. Antonio, who longed to show the gate off, decided that the first person who should see the pheasants that decorated the immaculate wrought iron door should be the man who had been his master, señor Martí. When the young blacksmith joyfully went to embrace the man who had been his teacher and show him his masterpiece, he found him at the back of his old workshop, in the blackest darkness. He had gone blind. His teacher, with tears in his eyes, felt and caressed the elegant iron feathers of the pheasants that Antonio had raised in the nest of his forge. The years had passed, Antonio had stopped being a child long ago was instead a man forged by his own hand. He met a young woman with dark, sloe-coloured hair, who was the first person to see his work grow, who gave him the strength to carry on when he most needed it, who cared for his wounds and who will always be at his side, for she is his wife and is still his one true love. Dad, this story has no happily ever after, because it carries on for many more years, a lifetime, because both your hands and your work are eternal. You were only thirteen when you met your three inseparable friends, the forge, the anvil and the mallet, who have never abandoned you because you have always loved them. You can’t just look at your work, you have to feel it, just like your teacher did, because behind every hammer blow that brings your work to life, there is effort, courage, bravery, sweat, tears and most importantly, hope. Nature has always been your source of inspiration, and you have been able to create pheasants, storks, owls, fish, trees, bundles of firewood and tree trunks in iron, but as the philosopher Carlos Goñi said: “Of all the things that you have forged in your life, the strongest, most united thing has been your family”. I love you loads, Dad. Ismael From my viewpoint as a sculptor more used to clay and bronze, mastering and controlling iron and giving it form seems to be an unreachable goal, and for many years it was an unknown world that I thought impossible. Julio González, Pau Gargallo, even Eduardo Chillida have seemed far away both in time and distance, but Antonio Díaz, whom I have known for several years now, has shown me than anything is possible. He has shown me that at the hands of contained strength and violence, hardness is tamed by will, and shapes and forms grow, expand and multiply, like live matter. Antonio’s work gives the impression that everything is spontaneous, as if the iron has folded, contorted and crushed itself without any outside effort, just out of some internal dynamic. In his workshop, sheets of steel curve and fit into each other under numerical control and in the middle of this domain of strength, fire, noise (sometimes deafening), amongst the sparks of the steel cutters and the blinding light of the welders, there is a corner where the noises and silence are different, as if from another world. It’s like an oasis where in the middle of the racket of an industrial warehouse, the sound of a trip-hammer creates more human sounds and rhythms, controlling intensity and tempo in a repetitive manner; sometimes forceful and sometimes with a rhythmic beat that seems soft like a caress. Amongst the red-hot iron, the hammer, the anvil, the trip-hammer and the whistling of the forge, the steady-handed artist creates what we might call his own three- dimensional music, transformed into shapes and volumes. I can’t imagine Antonio Díaz’s sculpture in silence, just as I can’t imagine them without the empty spaces of its interior or those that are projected towards infinity. Everything is sculpture. The hardest, most material thing is refined and purified and becomes spiritual. Whether with a patina, matt or gloss, the surfaces become imperceptible and vaporous, melting the sculpture into the atmosphere that surrounds them. Contemplating them relaxes and transports me away. The mere existence of this is a reason to be grateful. Cinto Casanovas Sculptor Fine Art Graduate. University of Sant Jordi Dear father, you don’t know how happy I am to be able to dedicate a few words to your great work. Yes, in singular, because it is your work, the union of many things as one, the fusion of many experiences, years and feelings…as raw material, later transformed and then finally viewed. I have always written to you, since I was a child; letters to Father Christmas, for your birthdays, during university, and today, on a Saturday evening. I was writing to you to thank you, to pour my heart out, and to encourage you to carry on doing what you most love to do: to work iron. At home we encouraged you for years to get back on the right path. You were born with this gift, but life didn’t let you dedicate yourself to it. It was like your life was a line perpendicular to a line that was your artistic creation, but now the lines are parallel. One of these lines was your work to get us a good start in life. You forgot about yourself to think about us. The other line was beauty, art in all its forms, but especially iron, fire, coal, anvil and hammer. I could write a book about you. So many memories come to mind: trips to exhibitions, antiquaries, stops in the middle of a city to look at something iron-related or even some detail in nature that might inspire you. Those meals enlivened by your drawings on throwaway tablecloths. Sometimes I wanted to take them with me. It made me sad to think that all those ideas ended up in the bin after the table had been cleared. Years defining ideas and thoughts on paper, until one day you saw us fly the nest and you decided to take your passion up again. I know that even despite this you will watch over us. In your work there is sacrifice, perfection, education, profession and feelings…all written in the curves of your pieces, those joints full of strength and love, because everything that you create is, at the end of the day, a reflection of what you considered your greatest work, your family. Some vibrations in the material are perhaps invisible to the human eye, but perhaps they are felt by the heart. This is how your work is, and this is how you are, an iron man, a strong man that never gives in, but with the kind heart of a father and a friend. I love you so much, your daughter, Ana. Ana The artist: Tempestuous, ardent, relentless in his form and background, AD blindly struggles against his own anxieties, attempting to strike up his own particular dialogue out of the conviction of his creative knowledge. He shapes the harsh metal with complacency but without concessions, trying to squeeze out as much sap as possible to be able to bathe in it, in the light of the forge, where different currents of wind cannot blow, in his shelter of embers and blazing lights, where he feeds his creative passion. Marking the tempo (even if not always rhythmically) of his own sensuousness, in a continued and unencumbered romance with the iron; he is a sculptor of instincts and voices, of indecipherable and enigmatic impulses that