The first works in this exhibition date back to 2020 and 2021, just after I had finished sorting through the work of my friend Isabel Baquedano. My testing return to sculpture has been guided by her memory—how she entrusted the work itself to the vicissitudes of the very act of painting—taking the freedom to pursue it day by day without worrying whether I get it wrong or not.

I feel as if not a lot of time has passed since then, maybe because the pieces needed to be isolated from the dizzying speed of what is going on in the world, where things seem to come from nothing and return to nothing without leaving any trace. And I would like to believe that, having committed ourselves to dismantling the master signifiers of our adventures, and thus becoming orphans of totalizing narratives, we would have to pay careful attention to the little “inventions” that arise unexpectedly, pregnant with contingency it is true though mindful of what has no name and, in all likelihood, underwriting the freedom of what we do.

Accordingly, the tributes have afforded me the figure of a recipient, ready to act on behalf of each one of you when you look at the pieces, which is no mean feat. It might be a loved one who helps us to walk (Trampolín para la Niña Martina), or those who have been branded mercilessly by the fire of creation (Kirchner en Davos and R. Walser en Herisau). Likewise, the titles foster the use of symbolic elements, thus facilitating the representational mission assigned to art.

The role allotted to offerings is not easy to illustrate, probably because such boldness conceals a sacrificial element that entails risking sanity in the largely unknown realm of the Other. Always drawn towards Arab art and culture, my most recent works respond to a line by Ar-Rusafi de Valencia, “if they return we will go to salute them,” as a sculptor’s offering of sorts (Litoral de Partida, Si el Mar pudiera hacerse de Jardines) to the people of other cultures when they undertake the risky journey to our territory, however close it may be, and all too often closed off and unwelcoming.

Yet before and after such reasoning, the operation ultimately aspires to lend meaning to the work, invoking and commemorating timeless art and sculpture: The Venus of Lespugue alongside Pablo Picasso’s Woman with Vase; or Portrait of My Wife and Tu es Petrus (figurative or abstract, depending on the subject, as Jorge Oteiza might say). At the same time, also worth underscoring is Brunelleschi’s dome, gazing technically at the sky of Florence; or Alvar Aalto’s buildings in Finland and Álvaro Siza’s architecture in Portugal, whose enjoyment and contemplation prompt me to claim that, like sculpture, architecture “weighs upwards”. It is no accident that they share similar principles when it comes to giving shape to the spatio-temporal event proper to them, decided between the abstract condition of the formal structure and the unbearably physical quality of the material, which ensures that the work is finally resolved on the side of satisfaction.

Here is a list of the titles, though, as you’ll see for yourself in the gallery, the sculptures tend to share them with one another.

Springboard for Little Martina                                   For Both Sides of the Border (2017-2023)

Lebanese, for Marta I.                                               For Both Sides of the Border (2024-2025)

One and Three Landscapes, for My Friends              Shore of Departure

          the Basque Sculptors                If the Sea Could Be Made of Gardens

For E. Kirchner in Davos:

Footbridge and Flow                       Plea

The Small Bonfire                            To an Unknown God

Untitled

The Platform

For R. Walser in Herisau:

                        When Mirages Were Fountains

                        The Cloud and the Garden

Untitled

                        Snow Footstool, I and II

A.B.