Aitor Urdangarin knows well the material he works with. The experience acquired at his brother’s workshop allows him to extract from the metal possibilities that grant personality and a great expressive energy to his works.
From his first works on, in which the steel bars of ten millimetres in section shape the interweaving from which the work begins, it is the drawing of a line in the space that demarcates emptiness and creates volume, in that full / empty dialogue that from Pablo Gargallo on has defined a major part of the 20th century sculpture.
In those first works, that appear forcefully in space, the figurative reference is event present and, subtlety, makes us think about Diego Giacometti and his theriomorphic collection, although carbon steel grants a very different expressive quality to Aitor Urdangarin’s works.
In his current works, the cross-section of the tubes is greater, but this does not prevent the line from folding up and twisting in a fluid stroke, as a dancing body, clinging emptiness, evidencing space. As if the material followed naturally and tamely that stroke drawn by the body that evolves in the air, free of any other reference.
Those trajectories are what Aitor presents to us in this stage of his work: solos or duets definitively fixed into the solid stroke of steel. A steel that realizes the energy of the internal impulse that would make the line to continue if it was not anchored to its base. A factor that reinforces the strain that arises from these sculptures.
In summary, an interesting work the evolution of which deserves to be followed in the future
ANA HERRANZ
