Alberto Bañuelos

Alberto Bañuelos was born in Burgos in 1949. As a child he was attracted by paintbrushes and showed a gift for drawing. He soon moved to Madrid and matriculated at the Faculty of Political Science and Sociology in the Universidad Complutense. There he combined his classes with five hours of drawing in private schools where he learned classical techniques. By 1978 he had his own studio, where he pursued his intellectual progress for three years, advancing from figuration to the most absolute abstraction. In 1982 he produced his first sculpture, a torso made from a block of alabaster. Torsos are present throughout the sculptor’s career, appearing whenever he comes to the end of one stage and starts on another, like a kind of marker on a path. It was during those years that he underwent a period of training in the legendary Italian quarries of Carrara, where the craft of marble was the air he breathed, the craft he learned and the food that nourished him. In Bañuelos works there are echoes of all the megaliths and monoliths that were erected in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages. The menhirs, dolmens and mounds in Carnac, Los Millares in Almería … all of them, all the great, mythical stones of the past hover within Bañuelos’s work. For all the stones that man has erected, ever since the first monuments of this kind that are known to us, obey the same offerings; they were simply the wish to pay tribute to their gods or to their dead or even the performance of some kind of act on Earth to attract the attention of heaven. Entre la Tierra y el Cielo (Between Earth and Heaven) is the theme that Bañuelos took for a travelling exhibition with which he toured Mexico between 2006 and 2008. In view of the increasing height of his works, one might well say that Bañuelos is one of those who seek to use stones to communicate with the heights as well as with those who view them on Earth. When he had finished the period in which he learnt his craft – indebted, according to José Marín, to the work of Henry Moore in “his desire to explore materials with the aim of making figures acquire a remarkable fluidity of form” – in the series Quilla (Keel), which coincides with what that critic has defined as the period of “the first personal imprint on his work”, there is already a tendency to elevation which has become a constant feature in his work, even in his latest sculpture, in which stones adore the heavens. This sculptor’s career is also marked by some exquisitely polished works, such as the Torsos and Lunas. But many of the Torsos and Lunas, and also the Quillas, come from stone that has barely been dressed, or else they pierce it. And the fact is that in the course of the twenty-five years of artistic activity that he is now celebrating, having initially worked with other materials more adapted to flowing forms, Bañuelos has gradually but inexorably tended towards stone. And his stone sculptures proudly exhibit their abrupt forms, deliberately evoking shapes produced by metamorphism. His obsession with stone – alabaster, basalt, Zimbabwe granite, Yugoslavian and Carrara marble, Calatorao stone – which he transports, breaks up and shapes, without the help of anyone else, also brings Bañuelos close to those artists from the dark night of time. Moreover, his tendency towards stone has led him inevitably to carving, which is a hard technique, to say the least, as opposed to the process of adding pieces to a work or shaping it out of soft material which is then hardened by whatever procedure may be required. Yet he downplays the importance of this challenge, for work is what brings him composure. The contemporary character of this artist from Burgos is such that his affection for stone, first appearing in the flowing forms of the series Juegos (Games), 1983–84, provides a very clear summary of the course which in recent years has led us all from a now distant fascination with technology to the current communion with nature. As far as traditionalism and universality are concerned, Bañuelos has himself questioned whether his search for perfection of form is an aesthetic concern or a moral category. It can be understood as traditionalism because it brings him close to the asceticism of the mystics of Castile, almost placing him in the footsteps of Teresa of Ávila’s Camino de perfección. But he is also universal, because in his work there are concomitances with artists remote from Castilian asceticism, such as certain British or American artists. A noteworthy example is Spiral Jetty, made in Great Salt Lake, Utah, in 1970 by the American sculptor Robert Smithson, and recalled by Bañuelos in his most recent installation/artwork, Homenaje a Smithson (Homage to Smithson), 2009, shown for the first time in this room. The year 2003 was also an important date because it marked the beginning of the new period that had been heralded in the artist’s career, the period of deconstruction. It was then, when he was studying angles, that Bañuelos became aware of the new language that emerged when he made cuts in stones. He used weathered stones and then split, tilted, shifted or remade them. “It is like reinventing life again and again. Jacques Derrida talked about it. I unmake stones and make something different with them. That is life, establishing a new way of looking at something that already exists,” the artist has said, and he continues to reflect on what changes or is transformed or flows. There is an element of Oriental philosophy in his words. His technique is like cutting a fruit into pieces or like opening a door and letting the soul appear. It is the same as what happens when stones that have been shut up for thousands of years are cut and other forms and colours appear beneath them. “The element of surprise is fundamental, and I admit that I have always enjoyed playing. The artist never forsakes childhood.” The exhibition sets out to be not so much a chronological survey of Alberto Bañuelos’s finished works as a reflection of a living way. The works are shown in connection with his own workshop, where finished pieces stand alongside others which are still projects or scale models – Estantería. Maquetas (Shelves. Maquettes), n.d. – allowing the sculptor to play, to think and to evolve.