LLEI D'ART 11

sense and in the existential sense too. It means taking control of our own image and the images of things created. Being true to the model implies being dealing with the constant tension between the ideal and the real. This tension between the ideal and the real has consequences on various planes. On one hand, our gaze is full of prejudices. What we believe or know precedes our vision and substantially conditions it: this conflict is made patent by modelling from life –either portraying a model, be it a face or a body– and is an intrinsic part of representation. ‘We never look at just one thing: we always see the relationship between things and ourselves [...] what we know of believe affects the way in which we see things’ (J. Berger, Modos de Ver. Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 1975, pp. 13-14). On the other hand, and as a consequence of the aforementioned, there is a tension between the conventional image and the image itself, in this case derived from our own real experience with the live model. The historical trend has consisted of the search for and creation of ways to resolve problems like: ‘how do you draw an eye, how do you draw a mouth’, etc. The regulated answer to this kind of questions has led to the solutions proposed by academic formulism: the history of the Academies. Thousands of perfect statues came out of the academic formula that only transmit an idea of petrified beauty, in a similar way to the majority of our current ‘academies’, which have specialized in creating sculptures of wrought iron or calculated installations that remind us of neoclassical marble in a postmodern version. For this reason we need to transform art born out of a kind of ‘formulist’ method, but not through a more expressive or subjectivist method, but through a real process of constructive and interiorized – even hermeneutic – creation. Thus the artist and the viewer can become conscious of our limits but also our certainties, so that our certainties about the real become part of a relation system that bring together ‘the beauty and the being’, in the words of Lobato ( Ser y belleza , Ediciones Herder, Barcelona, 1965). It would make no sense to make three-dimensional, more or less attractive, forms (or paintings, installations or performances) if we do not understand that the process of creating a sculpture is a process of ‘elevation’ and ‘spiritualization’ of the subject, and that the internal- external relationships, which should run through the form, as a universal metaphor for creation. For this a vocation based in rigour and passion is required, as well as a constant revision and broadening of concepts to contribute to a clarifying introduction to the intimate meaning of sculpture, since that ‘the artwork has a kind of exchange value between the visible and the invisible, between myth and history, between sacred time and the everyday’. Understood thus, the art of the nude – to return to Clark – is not same time we undertake an action that is most characteristic of modelling; the primary notion that comes out of the contact with the clay. Using an Aristotelian term, modelling ‘actualizes’ creation i.e. is makes creation go from potential to fact, and concretizes creation in the modelled form, which is nothing but a new image. The ‘actual’ action is exemplified in a very specific way in clay modelling because of the presence of the tactile, of its material definition, of its dependence on the material for the expression of the transcendental. We could say something similar about carving, which is defined by each of the strikes on the marble. However, clay offers us a more sensual and primary side to the relationship with the elements of the earth. At any rate, this duality between the material procedures of formalization and the internal procedures of ‘imaginería’ i.e. creation is made clear in sculpture. By its process, sculpture makes us discover how the form gives an origin, how it manifests itself on an apparently inert material. In the case of clay, pressing the finger into it leaves an imprint, a hole. But this hole is not only moving material, but it also means the transmission of a message, of a meaning. Each of our actions are prints, but not prints only in the physical meaning of the word, but they carry the meaning of the modelled print. Each of them, more or less consciously, informs the material. The value of this meaning is qualitative, rather than quantitative: what is means is not important, but the fact that it means something is. That is to say, it has some kind of sense, a presence, a door open to the universe, to abstraction. Thus we can appreciate the development of a type of sculpture that we have traditionally called classic, and that found one of the best exponents of an abstract capacity for figurative representation in Polycletus, when he created (according to Pliny) a sculpture synthetized from this own thought: the now-disappeared Kanon . On the opposite side we find deformation, or stylization. The models of expressionism or formalism have tended to follow this path which give rise to all kinds of formal solutions that are no help at all in this abstract vision of the sculptural depiction of reality. Sometimes stylization (which is quite different from personal style or character) masks deficiencies or overvalues virtuosity. Both solutions, which are antithetical, end up castrating the path of aesthetic knowledge proposed by sculpture both to the viewer and the creator of the art work. Being loyal to the real model means not only representing natural reality, but beginning to slowly realize the meaning of representation. Being true-to- life is, above all, being truthful – adhering to what in art is understood by ‘sincerity’ by the artist to his work. Depicting reality means undertaking a three-way dialogue: author/viewer, model and artwork. It means being conscious of our limitations, of our own limit in the physical Miquel Blay Fábregas. Los Primeros Fríos/ The first cold days, 1892. Mármol/ Marble . Jardín Botánico de Buenos Aires. Foto Roberto Fiadone. 65