Angel Garraza

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We are what we are

Con Oteiza en Alzuza, 1979

Sculpture is, without doubt, the creative genre which has the strongest relationship with the history of the human being, more precisely, with the history of the animal-human relationship with their natural surroundings. In fact the entire history of sculpture can be seen, in a certain way, as an affirmation of man as part of the all-natural. In contrast to the virtual slant of other creative forms such as literature or music –pure immateriality-, painting -emancipated long ago from the manual search of pigment- or the more recent fields of photography, cinema and video or new technologies, sculpture maintains, and will always maintain, at its base, a metaphor about the relationship between man and nature through earth, wood and metal, natural elements with which the sculptor plays, creates and recreates. This relationship is in turn a reflection about time. The time of mankind -fickle, changeable, linear, and inevitably final, mortal- in sculpture, confronts the time of nature, -cyclic, constant, eternal-. From the human desire to make natural time its own, from the anxiety for immortality and transcendence, grew religious feeling –distinct, however, of religions- and with it, with the urgent need for transcendence, to be something more, sculpture. Man was anxious to be like nature because he dreamed –and still dreams-, in the autumn of life, of the return of spring.

Of this dream to re-establish the rules of the game of life, to reform human time, were born the men of dry clay, of wood and of stone, men in whom time stood still, men who achieved the immutability and immortality foreseen only for gods. Sculpture, in this sense, was a rebellion against the decrepitude of the body itself, against the mortal destiny of the human being, that which, in the words of Jean Amery “Cancels out the sense of any reason”(1), and in good faith they achieved it. From the first prehistoric Venus, to the communist leaders of USSR, through Ramses, Jesus Christ or David, he who has become stone, has vanquished time. The greatest of the Pharos or the pain of Christ do not circumscribe to their moment in time, instead they run through the whole of human history.

Con Chillida en la sala Bancaja de Valencia, 1998	Museo South Carelian. Cragg, Garraza, Toubes y Kaneko, 1996

Time is precisely the fundamental key to the work of Ángel Garraza. Time, yes, but in a personal code, that is, time incarnated in memory, in memories, in that which we call past and that is nothing other than what we really are, the road we have travelled to where we are now. “The Fruits of Smoke” (2007-2008), represents the very same structure that reminds us of the brain, gradually submitted to a series of changes. It is, well, a metaphor of time, that is nothing if not change, in which the human –represented by the brain-like form of the pieces that make up the series-, is subjected to a kind of natural time, passing through a series of evolutionary states that journey from the flowering of buds to the falling of leaves, the colour changes they go through, that happen gradually in each piece. We see, therefore, that as in the medieval calendars that illustrate the porticos of churches, in this work time is represented through a natural image, of harvest time, of mother earth, but made mans´ time. Perhaps it is for this reason, because of this fundamentally human character, that a closing piece, that is, one of conclusion, makes sense in the series “The Fruits of Smoke”, one that impedes the resurgence of the cycle. We speak of the wall piece in which the leaves appear distributed over the surface like leaves fallen from a tree. This work is, it seems to us, a representation of the final act of a concluded process, that, without hope of an eternal return of the kind longed for by Nietzsche, turns out to be an image of human life when contemplated as a whole, an image of time “frozen”, -the past seen from the future-, without room for resurgence, rebirth, for a return to life. Time out, then, an image of the parenthesis of being that the human being signifies in the unchanging immensity of nothingness. Man, in the words of E. M. Cioran, “the shortest distance between life and death”(2). A moment, a sigh… and nothing more.

Si levantara la cabeza, 2003

The metaphor about human time and, for this reason, about death, which is served up in “The Fruits of Smoke”, is reinforced in the series “Kaleidoscopes” (2007).  In these, Garraza offers a type of recreation of elements which contain a strong representative charge, such as houses, penises, profiles of faces, crosses, hearts, lips, boots or hourglasses, that combine, in one of the series, with a piece that reoccurs and represents the cortex of the human brain, and in another, forming between themselves, an elliptic presentation and two linear ones. In the first of the series, each of the pieces of pictorial outline, as we said, is combined with another that represents a brain, if not fitting like a dovetail joint, one piece at least penetrating the other, becoming a single entity. This gesture of penetration is, without doubt, a reflection on personal identity in which certain external elements merge to form part of the group that makes up the I, in the manner in which they connect to what I am, something we also see in the series “Journeying through Memories” (2004), in which the journey travelled becomes memory and, in this way, goes on to form part of I.

Sin título, 2004	Recorriendo recuerdos, 2004	Sin título, 2004

Therefore, in “Kaleidoscopes”, we find ourselves united with multiple pieces spread out on the wall and floor that amount to a poetic image of memory represented by the elements that gradually over time join with the personal identity, disperse memories that, close to, proclaim their individuality, but at a distance offer a joint image undoubtedly homogeneous and cabal. Here again we find ourselves reflecting on time, on the one hand in the sense of journey travelled, of the addition to and change of I, of what we are, through the relationship extended in time with its surroundings. On the other hand, the metaphor illustrates the condition of accidentalness of I, in the way that only distance –time passed-, gives coherence to a tale that lacks it in the moment it is lived, offering itself as a series of isolated events without relationship between one another. In this sense, on occasions our own existence, our life, feels like a mere accumulation of coincidences, fruit of accidentalness and without the presence whatsoever of necessity. My life could well have been completely different, we say, and we wonder whether something born out of chance can make sense. Likewise, in this series of work by Garraza the viewer navigates through opposite poles of accidentalness and necessity, due to the combinatory character of the series –a reoccurring theme of this artist (3)-. Perhaps because of this, the professor of esthetics at the University of Valencia Róman De la Calle, once pointed out the “virtual possibility that the very work of Garraza itself would prolong and grow in an indeterminate way” through the addition to the series of “objects from the same family, or multiplying the rhythmic complexity of the alternate chromatic preferences of the said composite elements”. In the words of De la Calle, as we see, he highlights the fundamental allegory of the relationship of “being” with “time” that is present in the pieces by Garraza. From the combination of objects one piece stands out that could easily have been different, but which is that and no other, even when in its formal disposition it leaves the door open to reflection on otherness. As happens with our I, accidentalness becomes necessity. We could be something else, but we are what we are. I am who I am, just as God says to Moses in Exodus and not in another.

Cosas y causas	Cosas y causas	Cosas y causas

This same sensation of multiple potentiality, present in what in fact is, is also transmitted in the second of the series that comprises “Kaleidoscopes”, in which the same pictographic pieces are presented in an isolated way –now without their combination with the cortex- forming, on the one hand, an ellipse on the floor and, on the other, two wall panels on which the elements are presented in a literal way. Here again there is a reflection on the subject of memory, where depending on the disposition of the memories we obtain contrasting readings. The ellipse evokes movement: life. In contrast, the lineal positioning of objects gives an ordered reading, coherent, of memory, of the subsequent story that all life is: biography.

Caleidoscopías	Los frutos del humo

The art critic Alicia Fernández wrote, and rightly so, that “seen as a whole, the work of Garraza is an insistent undertaking to transform ideas into forms”(5). With reference to the exhibition that we now attend, these ideas are of a sentimental content, ideas arising out of experience, sieved by memory, recollections. We do not think in abstract, we are not gods of reason, or sons of it. We are the earth that we tread, the air that we breathe, the objects that surround us and to which we relate. We are lips, we are penis, we are home and face. We are boots, cross, heart. Or rather: we are the manner in which we think of the earth we tread, the way we see and the way we speak of the lips we kiss, the cross we bear, the home we live in. We are what we are and how we narrate ourselves. We are being, word and image.

Galder Reguera

1- “Revuelta y resignación. Acerca del envejecer”, Jean Amery, p.31. Pretextos, Valencia. 2001.

2- “El ocaso del pensamiento”, E.M.Ciioran, p.109. Tusquets, Barcelona, 2000.

3- For Antonio Garrido Moreno from the work of Garraza arises a “discourse from which emerge paradox, comparison, counterpoint, opposites, equality or difference, idea, dialogue with the space, the visual poem”. In “Reflejos sojelfeR”, a text included in the catalogue for the artist´s exhibition held in the Santa María Chapel, Lugo in 2001.

4- “l r d h”, Roman De la Calle, in the catalogue for the exhibition which the artist made in the Keramikmuseum-Westerwald from October to November 2000.

5- “Poemas formales”, Alicia Fernández, in the catalogue for the retrospective exhibition of the artist´s work held at the Aula de Cultural of the BBK, Bilbao, 2006.

 

 

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