Contemporary sculpture celebrates life – Germán Arzate Garza

In art and in the process of creating contemporary sculpture, celebration plays an extremely important role. For many, celebrating means getting drunk, smoking, having a lot of money, and so on, buying something. For most people, it is something physical.

For the artist dedicated to working on a contemporary sculpture, celebrating is being able to find or give meaning to a dream, an emotion, a feeling, the artistic aesthetic contribution of an artist to the world, the ability to express, capture, feel, and enjoy how an idea flows through your senses, how you can capture it through your hands and emotion…

That’s where the celebration begins, not when you finish a bronze sculpture. Sometimes, it’s a spark, it’s an image that appears in front of you. The art of contemporary sculpture looks at forms, it doesn’t matter if it’s a cloud or a piece of clay, if it’s a material or something existing, the idea can come in a movie, while talking to someone, looking at photos, or in a dream. That’s where the celebration begins, because that gives you tremendous satisfaction.

For the artist, celebration is lived in different ways.

For an artist, celebration is not something that happens the moment a work is finished, but from the idea, from the first thought of how to make a structure, how to make the clay, how to give finish and textures to the contemporary sculpture. When you manage to make a contemporary sculpture do that, you are at an advanced level where you can understand yourself with your works.

And it is very satisfying also when you can present them and see people’s reaction when they look at them. But that is part of a game in which the ego can intervene: “admire me because I am good,” that’s where the confusion comes in. The creator of contemporary sculpture cannot lose touch. You must remember your gift, the gift of revealing that form to the gaze. Your legacy.

We remember that pieces of art in antiquity did not come signed. Signing is very recent in contemporary sculpture. Nowadays, for an artist to celebrate is interesting but he must not lose touch and must be able to control success. He must know that whether his bronze sculptures stay in his rooms or are in the Louvre, he must feel the same celebration.

That the celebration of making something possible is what counts. The game of life for the artist is sometimes complex because he has to deal with mixed emotions, the game of life is sometimes very cruel to the sculptor. He must recognize between the mundane and the material.

Celebration is beautiful, it has its moment and its reason, sometimes you can celebrate for nothing. You can caress a skin and you are celebrating in your mind. You can caress a flower, shaping it in a contemporary sculpture, or watching a sunset, celebration is always present.

The artist celebrates in different ways, he likes friends, bohemianism, music, appreciates the fine arts, or knows himself differently. All artists of contemporary sculpture must celebrate the fact that they can beautify the world and that they have a commitment.

If you don’t contribute, don’t destroy either.

The game of life is interesting and the contemporary sculpture artist must know how to move like a fish, many things that are part of art but not necessarily of celebration must slip away from him. There are stories of artists who do not know how to balance, one must learn to manage the ego and say “yes, it can be done or no, it cannot.” For me, in particular, celebration is something that can exist and I can tell you that celebration is one of the most beautiful things that exist.

I want to present to you some of the contemporary sculptures that I have made and that try to offer an idea of how I celebrate life.

 

TORTUYO

Tortuyo is the symbiosis between an animal and a human being, an animal like a turtle and the human that could be you or me. A symbiosis between a long-lived turtle and a human being. Everyone wants to live a long time, but to achieve it you must walk steadily and constantly. More than taking fast, effective steps. This sculpture is the symbiosis of a turtle as a being that walks to where it wants to go, and thus we can be you or me, hence its name: Tortuyo.

 

UNO

UNO belongs to the mystical series of my sculptures and has great meaning for me since what I represent in these contemporary pieces is a search, a path, and an essence of the human being which in this case is represented in the union of a man and a snail. Like a hermit crab. First is the snail. There its meaning begins. It has a beginning at the tip like every beginning of life, and then the spiral of grooves and peaks begins.

The grooves and peaks tell us that’s how life is. Each groove is a challenge or a disappointment, and each peak is a success and at the same time a problem. The duality is this spiral, each spiral is a year, each spiral is a moment and something that marks you, that spiral grows as you advance in life, the grooves are deep or longer but they become more beautiful. The peaks become large, beautiful, at the same time beautiful and firm, solid.

I wanted to show the human being living in a snail, like a hermit, and like hermits we occupy a piece of life. Sometimes we want to go out and see what’s outside, the representation of this human being, one, the one himself that we are. The word one refers to me, to you, to oneself.

All that I want to give with this contemporary sculpture.