Galería de las Misiones
José Ignacio 2007

Structure Istallation 2007 Models and paintings Galeria de las Misiones

Asepsis in movement

Text Melisa Machado
 

Daniel Escardó achieves both asepsis and wonder in an exhibition that blends two parallel projects:  canvas and sculptures that arise from these canvasses. If Escardó surprised us a few years ago with strange and limpid creatures that evoked large cetaceans, huge vertebrates or maybe brief and impertinent insects, he now entrances us with his majestic sculptures, massive and geometrical in form, and with his subtle models.

In the past one might have thought that one had strayed into a bizarre laboratory of obstetrical materials by mistake, and now one can imagine being inside a sophisticated toy shop exhibiting Legos for giants.

Model   Fiber wood and aluminum 11 x 12 x 14 inches 2007 Galeria de las Misiones

There is pleasure in glancing over the sinous curves, increasingly abstract and removed from zoomorphism.The curves seem impossible or wrong to the untrained eye, and compel the viewer to revise his perception, to expand it. There are reminders here of Vladimir Tatlin´s project for the Monument to the Third International, one of the icons of the Russian avant-garde of the twenties, which was never concluded.

Torres Torcidas 2007 Fiber wood aluminum casted in soli foudry and stainless steel
31 x 31 x 126 inches Galería de las Misiones

However, the spiralling, vertiginous decisiveness of the Ucranian constructivist’s curves becomes plasticity and multiple possiblities in Escardo´s work.  His structures do not appear as monuments. Escardo´s sculptures, place themselves in a conceptual space that invite both aesthetic enjoyment and dialogue.

Acrylic on canvas series "Las pajareras de Dufy" Title "proxima salida" 51 x 102 in 2006

One is even tempted to transform them:  the artist states that with a few tools and some time on one’s hands, it is possible to manipulate and modify the curves.  The almost totemic geometrical towers that stand erect in the public eye, are not only porous and transparent to eyesight and hands,  but they are also pliable.Transformable monuments?  Mutant sculptures? Perhaps, if what is being celebrated is not a single dogmatic truth but rather variety and the constant variation arising from experience.

Model Fiber wood and aluminum 11 x 12 x 14 in 2007 Galeria de las Misiones in the back Dorus Blasted aluminum and iron 14 x 5 x 14 in

With roots in the geometrical and constructivist traditions, Escardó now develops an art of the diverse and the sinuous.  His most recent production opens a rich dialogue with a few international references and also, in a closer and more affectionate way, with an important national tradition with which the Galería de las Misiones is particularly associated with:  the collection of Uruguayan abstract art of the fifties.

Acrylic on canvas series "Las pajareras de Dufy" Title "No todo se está iluminando" 51 x 102 in 2006

For this reason, the choice of this artist as a contemporary presence in the gallery, associated with others like Antonio Llorens (1920-1995) with whom he shared the Inca award in 1987, or with sculptors like Ricardo Pascale or Pablo Atchugarry, in a show that displays part of this collection, in January-February 2008, effectively underlines this subtle interweaving.

One can especially appreciate in Escardo´s latest work - more synthetic, abstract and geometrical -  a certain dialogue with the paintings of María Freire (1917), José Pedro Costigliolo (1902-1985) or Américo Spósito (1924-2004).

Model for "torres torcidas" Fiber wood and aluminum 4 x 4 x 15 in 2007

Maybe this dialogue is part of the artist’s passage through Guillermo Fernández´s workshop (1928-2007), where he deconstructed Rembrandt´s drawings and observed in his words, how the artist occasionally “constructed” heads or feet by reiterating the same icons or symbols.  There is a sort of plastic dance in search of movement and embedment of the parts, which is never final. 

Structure Istallation 2007 Models and paintings Galeria de las Misiones

Without a doubt, in this last stage the artist is consciously seeking forms that move away from what is organic.  Even if some works of this exhibition still evoke vertebrate or delicate DNA chains (particularly the smaller models in wood), they are created in a geometrical key.

Structure Istallation 2007 Models and paintings Galeria de las Misiones

Some of the towers are  foreshadowed in models or are exactly those models.  Some are glimpsed in the canvasses.  Others stand erect in all their splendour.  Perhaps the best way of enjoying them is to allow the eye to travel from one to the other, and observe the intense dialogue that is generated.

The fragments of his sculptures, held by nuts and bolts that occasionally become like metallic petals, create a hypnotic geometry that feeds off fragmentation and multiplication, bringing fractals to mind.  This effect is dizzying at times, at others serene.

The fastening system of the latest towers has become more stylized and the embedded parts have become squares or rectangles instead of exxes and triangles.  The successive parts create units which look unfinished and ever changing.  These structures can become this or that according to the time of day, the place, the light or the lense through which one observes what the artist materialized and left to disturb or to soothe whoever stops here.

Model Fiber wood and aluminum 12 x 12 x 40 inches 2007 Galeria de las Misiones

Acrylic on canvas series "Las pajareras de Dufy" Title "regreso a casa" 44 x 64 in 2006

The series of paintings forecast and complement the described pieces.  Escardó uses a perspective on his canvasses that is often altered or turbulent. That vertigo or dislocation serves as the background and foundation for the bigger pieces.  They signal a turning point in the process: the departure from the zoomorphic towards the multifaceted, abstract sequences.  On observing the paintings they appear like a grand Mikado, as if the artist had thrown into the canvasses -and at random- the very pieces of his future sculptures.  It is as if he had picked up gone back to what he had glimpsed at the beginning - a kind of fragmented vertigo, fractal and oppressive - for the creation of vertical and three-dimensional shapes.

Some of the titles of the paintings offer clues to the  trellis that exists between both projects:  “Not everything is becoming enlightened”, “Cyclical circles”, “The new order”, “Eclectic Lights”.

Acrylic on canvas  series " las pajareras the Dufy 47  x 61 in

Escardó says that he started on this path using 3D design programs.  If in Objectum he approached the animal kingdom with mechanisms and pre-designed parts, he now returns to technology, this time at the service of geometry.

Torre Roja 2007 Fiber wood aluminum and stainless steel 31 x 31 x 126 inches

Another route,  another return. Another reverting dive to delve through the labyrinths that separate and at the same time communicate the mechanical with the human, the natural with the artificial, the rigid with the flexible, the inanimate with the alive.

His paintings are plastic experiences on this sinuous path, articulations of a trail that seems to zigzag or twist in hiperstructured and surprising shapes, calculated and also impredictable.  They are diving-boards calculated with pinpoint precision to serve as a base for yet another leap.

Structure Istallation 2007 Models and paintings Galeria de las Misiones

The potency of this impulse is evident in the towers and models.  Thus there is a passage from the figurative to the non-representational, where only faint traces of the former cetaceans remain. Geometrical post-figurations; uniqueness and asepsis in movement.  A pact between the laboratory, design, synthesis and the art of sculpture.

Large sacale model for Trans-Lucida