The Uruguayan artist Pablo Atchugarry He defends the sense of “eternity” of sculpture, capable of dialogue with classical Rome or with contemporary architecture, and vindicates with his work the need to become “friends” with the nature that “we have damaged so much.”
The sculptor, born in Montevideo in 1954, inaugurates the exhibition this Thursday in the City of Arts and Sciences of Valencia (Spain) Atchugarry. Towards the futurean outdoor exhibition of seven large sculpturesmade in the main materials with which the artist works: marble, bronze and steel.
EFE/Biel Aliño
The exhibition establishes a dialogue between architecture and sculpture, which is also a conversation “between light and space” that are part of the essence of both disciplines, explains the artist in an interview after finishing the installation of the works, between those that numerous tourists already pass through and photograph.
A review of his sculptural world
“My entire sculptural world is present in the exhibition”, details Atchugarry, since the pieces made of Carrara marble, the one used by the Renaissance artist Miguel Ángel, offer a chiaroscuro that contrasts with the pristine white of the architecture of the Spanish Santiago Calatrava; or lost wax casting with more contemporary car colors, in red and blue; mirror-illustrated stainless steel and pink marble from Portugal.
Atchugarry highlights the need for a sculptor to “feel the material”, which is also the essence of his work, from going to choose the marble in the quarries to sculpting it directly in the workshop.
“Without technology, without numerical control machines, so that everything goes through the virtuous circuit of the mind, the heart, the feelings and all of this translated through the hands”Explain.
EFE/Biel Aliño
Pablo Atchugarry
The sculpture, the artist assures, has a sense of “eternity”. “It can dialogue with the Rome of 2,700 years ago and even with the City of Arts and Sciences (of Valencia), so contemporary”, a “timeless bridge” that, in his opinion, encompasses the entire arc of human creativity.
Nature is also very present in the work of the Uruguayan artist and he vindicates the need, in the current historical moment, to “befriend” our environment.
“We are witnesses of deforestation and we have the obligation to follow the opposite path, reforest”he affirms, a spirit that he defends at the Atchugarry Museum of Contemporary Art (MACA) in Manantiales.
Sculpture as a craft
The sculptor remembers that he began painting at the age of 8 and has been working on sculpture as an artisan for 62 years, a path that began with a figuration that was synthesized until reaching abstraction.
He believes in the work of art as “a very attached son”, and the stones he selects in the quarries of Carrara are like “the children that come out of the mountain and that the mountain gives to the sculptor.”
“The responsibility for that birth and that upbringing, that education, is in the hands of the artist; and if the artist in turn delegates it to a machine, something is missing from the work of art”he reflects.
EFE/Biel Aliño
In his case, he works his pieces “vertically, perhaps like the dreams of human beings,” he points out, like the “energy of plants,” which also grow upwards. “seeking light, heaven, freedom”. “Maybe my work seeks the same things,” she compares.
Atchugarry declares himself an admirer of Spanish sculptors such as Chillida and Oteiza, Picasso the sculptor and Julio González, and believes that there should be a greater relationship between Spanish and Latin American artists.
“Spain is the great door to Latin America and we must strengthen that bond through the arts” for being “the best ambassadors of the culture of a people”he claims.
EFE
