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Drawing in the space
Francisco Carpio, 2002
¨Line is the footprint of a point that can't keep still". Actually, if we concede
that this brief, humorous and mildly poetic definition is right (and why not?)
-just as *Ramon proposes us- we find that the point in motion breeds lines.
A more or less hyperactive point, that draws as it rushes busily through the
plane and/or the space, innumerable roads and ways.
In reality, sensu stricto, line doesn't exist in nature, it is only about meeting
-in some cases failure to meet- and confluence between planes. But that
shouldn't matter so much to us; geometry is a subject sufficiently serious,
boring and reasonable for us to feel the right to ignore it. Besides, it's already
known that from Oscar Wilde on, nature imitates art. I am sure that some
of these thoughts were cooking in Jacinto Moros' own head, when he
decided to start drawing -with lines- in the space.
What he is really trying to do with his work is: to take the visual minutes of
the road that this unruly and unsettled point describes; to show that nature
is mistaken and that line, like a frozen and motionless journey, can exist
if we really feel like it. Like a plastic prestidigitator, he tries to catch with
material that mobile itinerary, that anxious and dynamic zigzag which can
be a line in the air.
In the genesis of his sculptures, we perceive a certainly close relationship,
a brotherhood of formal intentions with painting and drawing. It's not
by chance that Moros started his artistic trajectory as a painter. In this way
these works are like drawings in the space, like brush-strokes of color that
rebel against their bidimensional destiny and long for a new 3-D body.
The dramatic and tortured sediment that lives in many of these pieces,
and that however, doesn't prevent them from giving off a lyric and
harmonious taste, doubtless has something to do with this titanic struggle
to grow in space and escape from the flat tyranny of the plane. Pieces
that are like notes in a diary, like letters of a binnacle notebook that
indicate the direction to follow, mapped on paper, and which will
finish acquiring -literally- a tridimensional body. A body that maintains
a constant state of liquid mobility: a solid stream of fluid wood that
floats, stops and, then again, goes on rising from the foundation of the
base.
There are no straight lines, they all are paths and routes curving through
streets of the air. Bends, curves, turns, loops, twists, meanders, foreshortenings,
prances and warps. A vegetable dance of roots, trunks and branches,
straightening and dancing in search of the food of light and the sun of
volume.
It's not a coincidence that -given this reflection of the plant's secret
world- wood has to be the material that exclusively shapes this work.
The noble lineage of wood, with its veins and arteries of petrified sap,
like perfect flesh and skin. Ebony, maple, ash, rosewood... colors and
smells which evoke the sleepy melodies of enchanted woods. Surely this
tangled and curved will which possesses them, can not be translated into
other materials, except maybe forged iron. But even the metallic line
tamed by the forging through a music of strokes and fire, wouldn't manage
to represent the air of lightness that he gets with these sculptures.
His thorough technique of work, on the basis of patiently sticking multiple
and very thin veneers of wood, as if they were the layers and stratums
of a vegetable and millenary archaeology, awards them equally that
bearable lightness, this air of filigree and lineal sparks, which as soon
it rises with nervous gesture up the walls as it twists and twists again
on the table, expectant, and suspended, ready to start other new steps
in the air.
With an art as tactile as the sculpture is, the treatment of the surfaces
acquires an undoubted importance. The skin of these works appears
to be treated with delicacy, with slow care. That skin which, as Paul Valery
pointed out, ends up being transformed into the most profound, reflects
a very finished and brightness, a will to take out the intrinsic beauty of the
material -in this case, wood- to listen to its "inner music". The polished
surfaces, delicately textured with graphite and some light chromatic,
insinuations, provoke in the spectator the desire to touch them, which turns
out to be the ultimate test for the sculpture. That which is born for the eye
also searches for continuity with the extension of the touch.
After a first look, Jacinto Moros' compositions could appear before
our eyes as if they were only abstract objects, deprived of the wish of
representation. However, they are forms which equally could apply
Brancusis' words to: "...that thing they call abstract, it's the most realistic
one, because what is real, is not the outside but the idea, the essence
of the things". Essences that are converted into figurative echoes,
convulsive, dancing and curled bodies which get twisted, raised,
confused, stretched and coiled in a dance of lines, in a authentic spatial
choreography. They are enchanted snakes too, spirals of smoke drawn
by an idle cigarette, solidified acoustic waves, colored ribbons thrown
in the air by some invisible girl, capricious columns of a vegetable
architecture, wooden bandages for treating the injuries of the wind...
FRANCISCO CARPIO
Like an extended poem in the air
José Marín-Medina, 2004
In spring of 2004, an outdoor sculpture exhibition was held in
The Gardens of Luxemburg in Paris. It was a project
in the format of “sculpture country”, entitled:
L´eloge de la nature (Tribute to Nature).
Jacinto Moros was among twenty four guest artists.
More than a sculpture in itself, his work Movimientos líquidos,
(Liquid Movements), was the creation of a sculptorical
landscape.
It ascertained an occupation, an individual sensitivity to space,
a refined use of the garden in dealing with energies and shapes
of Nature through a wooden structure made up of eight pieces,
gradually joined by the passing of the contemplating eye, and dominated
by the sinuosity of its wavy lines.
Its unfolding raised and expanded in the air like an extended poem,
a poem of baroque spirit that tries to enter into an unlimited space
and make accessible the infinite, that is, the mystery lost
in infinite chaos. This same concept of a sculpture being
built like a poem written as lines developing in the air,
situating the piece in that elegant and interesting limit
of where design, sculpture, architecture and, even painting,
are -a territory of discord between the autonomous sculptorical object
and the story of bodies and energies at constant mutation-,
I say that poetry itself is the one that we now see encourage
the works of the exhibition that May Moré Gallery has dedicated to
Jacinto Moros in Madrid in this winter of 2005. It is about insistent
works on the peculiar fugitive drift that characterizes
the present baroque, the neobaroque.
Of course, Jacinto Moros can enroll in the present generation
of sculptors we call neobaroque, those who since the end of 1980 decade,
keep their sight pointed to a double and antagonist direction:
the one of the open process by the new geometrical abstraction
(postminimalism) and the one that recovers the attention to baroque,
understanding “the baroque” not like a style or way that belongs and
characterizes a specific period of the history, but like an aesthetic category
or formal quality produced and still producing along all the process
of our culture.
As far as we know since Omar Calabrese in his known book
L´etá neobarocca, 1987- Castilian edition, La era neobarroca, 1989
(Neobaroque Era, 1989)- analyzed how “the neobaroque is a time air
(turbulent, fluctuant and instable time) that invades many cultural
phenomenon throughout all knowledge fields. They make them
familiar to each other, but, simultaneously, they differentiate them
from other cultural phenomenon from a more or less recent past. (...).
That consists in the search of forms referred to the lost of the integrity,
the globality, the tidy systematization, in exchange of the instability,
the poli-dimensionality and the mutability”.
Following this direction, in J. Moros´ work, we see to mix the cold
aesthetic of the formal reduction and the geometrical language,
with the will of baroque spirit, fold, labyrinth, metamorphosis state
and the excess of the baroque spirit.
J. Moros´ work is developed between both domains, establishing
a peculiar dynamic balance, at the same time it keeps an ambivalent
feeling between the structural geometrical forms and the need
of representing the referred theme, what in this exhibition in May Moré,
is -as the title of the show declares- Drawn Energy.
The bottom line that presently runs the process in Jacinto Moros, is the one
that captures energy movements, adapting the matter and
turning the movement into solid. Before, the interest was centred on
taking the form of images, the kinetic energy of the liquid shapes,
forming into solid materials. The dynamic or force system of the
air running is now the energetic referent. The artist tries to turn it into
a practically pure movement and into a rhythm, a rhythmical spatial flow,
a “liquid rhythm” -in the sculptor’s words-.
These works transpire a naturalness sensation that corresponds
with a great simplicity treatment of the means that are applied.
“Simplicity” is a term we need to stop by.
We continuously say about a thing that it is simple when
it has got less body than others of their kind. In that sense,
Jacinto Moros´sculpture stands out by its simplicity, given
its aerial character. It consists of a light structure of flexible
materials (sheets or thin strips of vegetal fibers) that grow up
and adjust in the space, marked by the rhythm of fixed energies.
However, this simplicity and lightness of means doesn’t deny the long
process of its elaboration.
The material has been and keeps being an important plastic element
in J. Moros´ work, who knows very well that Art consists in a conceptual core
and a vision. Now then, in order to formulate that concept and vision
as an art work, it is precise to choose materials that embody it, and to apply them
a fixed technicality, in consideration of the aim that it is pursued.
The avant-garde sculptors´ declared preference for materials of industrial
kind moves the modern sculptors away from materials as warm and expressive
as wood, whose carving counts on the origins of the sculptural act itself.
There are, however, specific practices that testify the singular role that
wood has played in the modern process of the sculpture, from the fixed
constructions -many of them polychromed- cubists, futurists,
Dadaists
and expressionists carried out in the decade of 1910 by Picasso, Laurens,
Archipenko, Lipchitz, Fortunato Depero, Giacomo Balla, Vladimir
Baranoff-Rossiné, Arp, Brancusi, Kurt Schwitters and Kirchner.
At the same time, and regarding the modernity sculpture
in Spain, during the last years a series of renewals sculptors
have made wooden works, such as Eduardo Chillida, Moisés Villelia,
Navascués, Camín, Ibarrola, Adolfo Schlosser, Mitsuo Miura, José Ramón
Anda y Francisco Leiro. In the same line, but with characters of his own,
only his, the proposal of Jacinto Moros now counts.
The singularity of Moros as for the material, is born from the fact that,
since the beginning, he built the laminated work without a clear
perception of its stratified layers, after this, he has continuously created
laminated bodies, usually combined in layers of ash, ebony,
palisandro and coloured wood. Throughout this technique,
he produces a band of wood whose profile makes evident the variety
of texture and, all over, of colour components, at the same time
it visually vibrates in a particular way. Being everything manual,
Jacinto Moros now resorts the presence of the “formica” to underline
the industrial concept that is in his poetry. With that so sophisticated
procedure and with the effect of occasionally painting in oils the surfaces
of the strip with bright colours, he gets to come near and to make
the concepts of sculpture, painting and design talk. In the same way,
the artist projects aerial, crystalline architectures and imaginary
landscapes whose drawings represent ways of water flows and directions
of air running with these laminated works, getting the sculptures
to be metaphor of the time process and of the transformation.
Sculpture of rhythmic and architectural order - where we can find
a cycle of small formats inspired by the shapes of famous constructions,
such as the outside of the Guggenheim Museums of New York and
Bilbao-,
and sculpture, in the same way, inspired by a formal information
of natural energies, Jacinto Moros´ works shape harmonious bodies
dominated by the free space, by the hollow of drawing lines in constant
mutation, written as abstract deeply musical symphonies, integrated
by different and subtle layers of matter, so light they sway and vibrate as a sound,
a tight silence in time, as a silent music referred to Universe laws.
Intangible expression, they are works that gravitate in the Nature Pole,
keeping a concept of opening out in the space, as well as a purpose
of polisensorial exploration, knowing that -as Einstein said
- “the space manifestation can not be separated from the bodies”.
JOSÉ MARÍN-MEDINA