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Pablo Atchugarry is simultaneously very modern and a very traditional kind of sculptor. Born in Uruguay, from parents of French Basque and Italian origin, he has traveled widely, particularly in Europe, but also in Latin America. In his youth he was in touch with some of the major traditions of 20th century Latin American art, in particular with the Constructivist tradition founded by Joaquín Torres García, the most eminent Uruguayan artist of the first half of the century. He was also aware of the work being produced by the Muralist school – Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco – in Mexico.
Like many Latin American artists he began to exhibit his work very young – but what he exhibited were drawings and paintings, not sculptures. It was only when he came to Europe that he fully discovered his vocation as a sculptor and, in particular, as a maker of stone carvings. This discovery led him to visit Carrara, which is still a mecca for aspiring sculptors from all over the world, because of its celebrated quarries and their seemingly endless supply of white statuary marble. It was in Carrara that he learned to carve stone, though he did not settle there. He still visits the quarries regularly to find material for his work. In addition to marble from Carrara he uses rose-colored marble from Portugal and occasionally black marble from Belgium. Though he continues to make drawings, and sometimes experiments with mixed materials of various kinds, marble is his primary means of expression. The carvings he produces are not entrusted to other hands, though Carrara has long been a flourishing centre of production for work of this type. In recent years its skilled resident artisans have made sculptures subsequently signed and exhibited by artists otherwise as different from one another as Maurizio Cattelan and the veteran Italian film star Gina Lollobrigida, who now pursues a career as a sculptor. This is in fact the rather cynical continuation of a long-established and more respectable tradition. Nearly all the major sculptors of the 18th and 19th centuries, Canova and Rodin among them, produced marble sculptures that were largely the work of assistants working from plaster models, with only the finishing touches supplied by the master.
In its early period Modernism rebelled against this quasi-industrial approach to sculpture. There was, for a while, a cult of ‘direct carving’. Brancusi was one exemplar, and in Britain it attracted the loyalty of leading Modernists such as Eric Gill, Jacob Epstein and Henry Moore. Most of its adherents, however, fell away from the doctrine as they became celebrated and successful, as they found they could not produce enough work to satisfy a horde of eager clients without an increasing use of studio assistants. They moved from stone into bronze, and where they made large sculptures in stone these were created following the 19th century system, even though the stylistic results were apparently very different.
Though Atchugarry does make use of studio help for merely physical tasks, such as moving large blocks of stone from one place to another, maintaining his tools in good working order etc., he is extremely unusual in a contemporary context because all of this sculptures are, in the most literal possible sense, the product of his own hand, though the tools he uses are sometimes high tech. Not surprisingly, both he and his admirers refer this insistence on physical engagement to Michelangelo, who spoke of sculpture as a process of freeing an already imagined, pre-existing form from the block that imprisoned it.
However, one has to look at a difference in context. Though Michelangelo was, in the terms of his own day, an innovator almost without parallel, he nevertheless worked within the framework of the Renaissance humanist tradition. The human body – the male body above all – was the paradigm of Renaissance sculpture. What Michelangelo imagined within the block was a human body, or, at most, a pair of human bodies – the kind of pairing we see in the Rondanini Pieta. Like other Renaissance sculptors, he looked to the example of the lost classical world of the Greeks and the Romans, to supply him with a means of escape from the rigid conventions of medieval sculpture and, in particular, from its fear of the flesh.
Atchugarry and all his artist contemporaries live in a completely altered world. In artistic terms, anything is possible – anything the human imagination can encompass. There are no barriers. Art can be abstract or figurative, just as the artist chooses. Sculpture can be made of any material the artist selects even if it is apparently unsuitable to the purpose of creating durable three-dimensional forms. This libration is also, paradoxically, a restriction, as it gives the creative artist nothing to rebel against, no barriers to overcome. In addition, it leaves the audience for art bewildered. Neither they, nor indeed the critics who are supposedly their professional instructors, can form any settled idea about what art is about, or what purposes within society it is supposed to serve.
Within this situation, Atchugarry, as a Latin American artist and indeed as an artist from Uruguay, occupies a rather special position. Latin American Modernism was the first Modernism not completely rooted in the Western tradition. It was the pioneer in this, an has been followed by Modernist and contemporary art movements of considerable originality in other non-western locations – in China, Japan, Ran and other parts of the Middle East for example. There has been a tendency on the part of all these schools of art to look for specifically local traditions that could be placed beside western Modernism and that could offer a form of cross- pollination. In the case of Latin American Modernism there were frequent attempts to find a foundation in various types of pre-Columbian art. The Mexican Muralists were examples of this – Diego Rivera liked to refer his activity to the paintings found in Maya temples and tombs, though his compositions owe at least as much to the frescos of Paolo Uccello, which he saw just before he left Europe to settle again in Mexico. Even Torres García was not entirely immune from this impulse, though he was in principle an abstract artist linked to the pan-European Constructivist Movement. His Cosmic Monument in the Parque Rodo in Montevideo bears invented Pre-Columbian glyphs.
In interviews, Atchugarry has been at pains to point out that Uruguay is one of those South American territories where there are very few traces of the Pre-Columbian past. The aboriginal inhabitants were nomadic tribes, who fiercely resisted European settlement and were exterminated. They left few material traces behind them. Uruguay is therefore a nation that has had to invent its visual culture anew.
It is fascinating to see how this process has worked itself out in Atchugarry’s own career. His early paintings and drawings, though related to Constructivism, are figurative. They combine Constructivist impulses with Expressionist ones, and they show an interest in the human figure. The figurative impulse is still present in his very earliest sculpture, which were made of cast concrete.
This impulse seems to disappear entirely in the mature sculptures in marble. These are typified by their surging upward forms, which can often be read as paraphrases of vegetation. Though Torres García was certainly an important starting point for Atchugarry, he has nothing to do with the mechanistic ethos that is typical of so many Constructivist art works. His sculptures constantly speak of his affinity with the forces of nature. He transforms marble into flesh, as Michelangelo once did, but it is the flesh of leaves and fruits and branches, filled with rising sap, with the impulse to grow, blossom and ripen.
Something that contributes very powerfully to this impression is his treatment of his basic material. Atchugarry is aware, and has noted in interviews, that the attitude of Greek and Roman sculptors to marble was curiously different from our own. They painted it to look like life, and in this sense, if no other, their sculptures were the predecessors of the realistic religious sculptures one finds in Spanish churches, with their glittering glass eyes and tears made of glass clinging to their cheeks.
This treatment contradicts the true nature of the stone. Statuary marble of the finest quality is translucent. Light strikes through the surface, rather than merely resting on it. This is especially evident in the two kinds of marble that Atchugarry uses most often - Carrara, and Belgian rose. By cutting marble into thin planes and folds, he allows the light that surrounds the forms to penetrate the shapes in a magical way. They seem to glow from within.
One of the things that Post Modern art criticism is most suspicious of is virtuosity in handling materials, which is often read as a confession of insincerity. Clumsiness, on the other hand, is often seen as a proof that the impulse behind the work feeds on genuine emotion, an emotion so powerful that it cannot be fully expressed. Atchugarry cannot benefit from this kind of interpretation. There can be no doubt that he is a virtuoso. He carves stone with astonishing precision and skill.
The point is that this skill is used for a purpose. It is not displayed as an end in itself.
Basically Atchugarry makes two kinds of sculpture. There are public monuments, often huge, and smaller pieces, made for private contemplation. When he makes a public sculpture he is following in the footsteps of a large number of celebrated masters who produced such monuments in the past, Michelangelo, Benvenuto Cellini, Gianbologna and Gianlorenzo Bernini among them. His task is, however, more difficult than theirs, in the sense that we no longer have a unified culture or a fully coherent system of education. The public that these pre-Modern sculptors addressed was familiar with the Christian story, and with the stories told in the Old Testament. They also, most of them, knew at least the outlines of the classical myths.
Sculptors making figurative works could therefore take it for granted that the narrative that inspired the work would be reliably present in the mind of the spectator, who would immediately grasp what a particular sculpture was intended to say. Critical judgment therefore focused on trying to distinguish whether the intended meaning, which everybody recognized, was expressed well or badly, successfully or unsuccessfully.
Makers of contemporary monuments start from a point that is much further back. They can in fact have little idea of what their audience will bring to the work, in terms of background and education. What they have to look for is a kind of leap in the dark, a sudden fusion of two psychological states, that of the artist and that of the spectator. The search for this fusion was essentially what the Surrealist Movement was about, and it is the reason why artistic attitudes derived from Surrealism have remained so powerful to this day, long after the movement officially died and passed into art history. Atchugarry is not usually compared to the surrealists by commentators and he has never suggested this link himself, except, perhaps through the admiration he has expressed for Picasso’s Guernica, which certainly owes something to Picasso’s experience of the Movement, though he was never fully committed to it. Nevertheless I think that Atchugarry’s monumental sculptures owe much of their success to an adoption of surrealist ideas about the need to create a direct link with the psyche of the individual spectator. There is no narrative as such, but a powerful transfer of feeling, absent from most contemporary public sculpture.
The smaller pieces – those made for private contemplation – invite the same process of psychic bonding, but perhaps in a less instantaneous, more leisured kind of way. The fact that so many of them radiate a kind of inner light, due to the marble chosen, and the virtuoso way in which it has been carved, facilitates this process. It becomes a kind of privilege to look at them.
Edward Lucie-Smith
Art Historian, Author and Critic
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