THE PRESENCE / ABSCENCE OF URDANGARIN’S SHAPES

The cold and rainy afternoon linked up the Cantabrian sky and Santander bay casting on the silver sea and clouds without the bustle of the strong northwest wind but beautiful and silent solitude. On the shore, temporarily, there were exceptional witnesses: Aitor Urdangarin sculptures. The curved, tamed shapes that the artist has intertwined with accurate scope intertwined in ways designed to give company to nature. No doubt a consequence of this presence was to make us feel differently about the land and the sea. The presence/absence creates in our minds a nostalgic memory introducing an experience of wholeness. Knots, parallel twisted, open or closed tamed shaped and free in its “destiny” which doesn’t seek an imitative or provocative aspect. But it shows significant material and perhaps the perceptual recognition of these signifiers that seem to disguise the personality of a painstaking job and brilliant that it now makes me nostalgic to the enjoyment of silence and eloquent shapes.

It is evident this work hasn’t been made to praise the gods, nor heroic propaganda or to show the harmony of the bodies or the funeral gravity. But the object is not to show nudity or body expression. It is not to be influenced by retro romantic communication. Aitor draws, however, using its suggestive abstract shapes and undying round Praxiteles, the post-modern erect version of the find and discovering work with lines, with rhythms and shapes. With a separation of the subject and object that is committed to nudity.

Far from the platonic metaphor, Urdangarin’s sculptural work reveals its own aesthetics elasticity and free through self-recreation. With the serious set of geometric research and the language of silence between nature and scenery and between the man and his concerns about space, gravity and dialogue between stillness and movement. With the monologue that cannot be before the most extensive and independent “intentio operis” that Umberto Eco would suggest if it was a written letter. As well as its own auto investigation on the subject –the subject- around its creative process.

It isn’t easy to describe the sensation these Urdangarin sculptures give on the edge of the Santander Bay with those weightless natural shapes in the scenery despite being the language of “sculpture –object” without reflecting. We can take the language of William Tucker when he talks about The Language of the Sculpture (London, 1974) after examining ways to make Rodi to Brancusi through cubist construction of Picasso or Matisse as well as stopping at Julio González, this Spanish Catalan Bohemian, and grandson of jewellery and metal workers.

A certain composure under the rain and apparently simple but sophisticated interweave of the weave shaped by Urdangarin in the sculptures, located for some time next to the Santander Bay of Cantabria made me think to the canonical betrayal of mass and volume, in conventional techniques started in modern age. This is the complementarily and opposition of the shapes and the space. The complexity of simple appearance of the Kasimis Meduniezky’s famous construction is suddenly in my mind as a paradigm of “poetry of space” (Robert Godwater’s expression, 1969) with contrasts inspired by the physical influence and rhythms that are not immediately seen in the form of Aitor Urdangarin. They didn’t let go at first, but came to force after a second contemplation.

In fact now I ask for inspiration from the best avant-garde Gerardo Diego – our great poet and lover of this sea -, he could describe the beauty of these sculptures that are done with key and at the same time with majestic geometric style the beautiful open bay with silver ripples and shadows at dusk finally swept away by the rain.

Several sculptural paths have been traced from Rodin’s romantic pathos to the realism of Julio González, from the path of the “mystic” Brancusi and Arp, or the “primitive” figurative expressionism of Picasso. Everything Urdangarin saw and felt, perhaps she looked a bit more towards the neoconstructive trend? Who knows! What I felt under the rain that afternoon by the bay was the improvised witnesses of Urdangarin’s linked wise knotting submerged in the sea but staying afloat on the shore, unharmed from last time, erect their apparent fragile shapes as obsessive proof of the never ending poetry of drawing in the open air and by water but with a very firm foot on the present ground, in temporary humility of the contemporary shore.

JESUS PINTADO USLÉ