Biography
In certain sculptors the pulse of primitive man beats, from contact with the primordial clay, from the first embrace between the form of matter and the instinct of form. They are the sculptors who know how to feel the principle of all difference in undifferentiated matter, who with their hands manage to extract a principle of individuation from raw matter. In this regard, José María Moreno Galván maintains about sculpture: “from the moment the gesture of touching transcends and becomes the gesture of modelling, the matter touched becomes individualized, becomes autonomous from its old passive gregariousness and becomes unsupportive from its origin to originalize itself thanks to its difference.” In this way, the sculptor who works with the primitive material creates, even without intending it, the meaning of a new form. Everything lies in this tension between form and form, between “the modeling that individualizes and the de-modeling that recovers the passive state of matter”.
This synergy between harmony and indeterminacy, proportion and irregularity, occurs in sculptors such as Pablo Serrano and is equally visible in Huelva-born Martín Lagares (La Palma del Condado, 1976). With a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Cuenca, which was a beacon for the renewal of Spanish art in the second half of the 20th century from its Museum of Abstract Art, Martín Lagares was nurtured there by a conception of art as a language always to be explored, language that needs to be in permanent tension, between form and matter, reason and heart, logic and instinct.
Martín Lagares works fundamentally with clay, terracotta, resin, bronze..., materials of immanence, far from the nobility of marble and its divinizing or transcendent obstinacy. Nothing is random. They are the most propitious materials to generate the creative and strongly expressive tension to which his sculpture aspires. José María Moreno Galván said about Pablo Serrano that: "He cannot avoid being the son of Phidias as much as he is of mud." And we could say something similar about Martín Lagares, due to that previously mentioned embrace between the knowledge of matter and the instinct of the form that occurs in his work. I play between the informal, due to its gestural and expressive condition, and the formal, because all volume cannot stop being form and because the form is the limit of the void. This struggle between form and expressiveness is the aesthetic key of Martín Lagares, without winners, despite the apparent victory of the expressive. As a sculptor, he tries to inject each work from his hands with his full flow of feelings, emotions and reasoning, leaving his mark almost with expressive violence. But we must not confuse this emphasis on the subjective and the expressive with a renunciation of form, or the search for dimension. In tension, as we said, is his aesthetic key, in his commitment to the greatness of the unfinished, to the beauty inscribed in imperfection, to the inscrutable link between form and expression.
Martin Lagares Sculptor.