Half kneeled standing over a small unstable box, his hands tied behind his back, head down, naked in front of the guards who watch waiting for the moment when he can’t take it anymore and falls, to get to the next level of torture. Happened in Abu Ghraib
This work forms part of the Series ”Gods will or the madness of man” where the brutality of mankind is shown. The image refers to the times when American soldiers torture and abuse prisoners. The torture methods sanctioned included also sleep deprivation, hooding prisoners, playing loud music, removing all detainees’ clothing.
A terrifying moment to remember. The body is static totally surrendered to its fate, creating a terrible tension with a strange sense of terror/beauty. Powerful and haunting image, ritual so brutal that it has stayed in my mind and, can imagine, of all who saw it too.
Extremes of brutality that should never have existed, but the human being moved by extreme passions and religions goes on repeating cyclically through years and centuries, with different staging, as something that it will never end. Man never learns.
Constantly back again to the brutality of men and now with a war in Europe. We keep hearing of the brutality of Russians against Ukrainians civils, killing for the pleasure of killing and raping women.
We know that in the world there is hunger, malnutrition, abuse, persecution, torture, due to images that hurt just looking at them, but time passes and everything remains the same, so we need to insist showing what I call ”Gods will or the madness of man”
Biography
Born in Santiago de Chile spend his youth working with copper in a family arts craft business that opened the world of sculpture. The 5 years of academic training were spend also in Chile studying architecture and when it was finished he moved at the beginning of 1976 to Barcelona, Spain and began working as a designer to earn its living. And what it should had been a short period it turned into nearly 30 years working as an industrial designer, graphic designer and image consultant, varying in years and with different companies. And from 2000, he add to his skills housing renovations for several years and nearly in parallel he took in charge the developing and management of a website of a tourist apartment company.
It was not until 2014, when his work started going slower, that he could look back to the incipient work that had been left in the arts craft workshop back in Santiago and decided that it was time to get back to it closing the gap in between.
Having studied drawing, metal engraving, architecture and with all the years of experience as an industrial and graphic designer in sculpture, he began as a self-taught person working in sculpture and using the materials that were more close to him and to the workshop that needed to be completely transformed from the old design studio.
The place itself has many limitations to be a real sculpture workshop, as to start with has very little natural ventilation. So as a first step and in an experimental way, he decided to use the materials that could be more related to his previous works as designer, and that he could work more easily; cardboard and recycled cardboard boxes, some pieces of wood, normal glue and acrylic paint to start his work. To be said very economic materials that have allowed him to working intensely without having to be in financial trouble.
Working all this time manually with basic tools and recycled material has been an interesting exercise at the level of practice and development. This has served to highlight the meaning and importance of learning in the manual trades of artisan work in an industrialized world, in turn recovering in some way the organization of the work learned at a very young age in the artisan workshop with the family.
The concept of Arte Povera is closely linked to the basis of the work carried out by the use of very basic materials and tools and also the concept of Minimalism by trying to simplify the figure as much as possible to achieve a strong expression with minimal elements. The work done is completely define by this two basis adding to the minimalism the Brutalism due to the expressive violence that the works done reduced to their minimum expression take from their interior. The simpler the figure, the harsher the reality it expresses, with no traps or veils. Its been a constant in the work the idea of getting to basis removing everything that could be superfluous to arrive at a series where the bare cardboard is the only thing used to build the figures.