Bronze

“At first I had an aversion to bronze as I thought of the cold, green, decorative bronze. I felt that bronze sculpture had no soul and the pieces had no life of its own, maybe for the fact that there are a number of originals. It started as a challenge, as someone told me I should not do anything more than clay, and this led me, I decided I was done with clay, I threw my oven, I gave away the materials. I learned to understand the technique of bronze and realized there is life behind what one sees in bronze. Usually there is a waste of the technique aesthetics; the trace of the process is erased. If I managed to let the process be evident, it wasn’t cold anymore, especially in rescuing the bronze casting process in Mexico.

The bronze in Mexico is a bronze worked very freely. It is made with recovery bronze, and is dirty, which itself brings to each form a number of different accidents that give a unique personality to the sculpture: sometimes it gets golden, sometimes burnt. And, unlike work in clay, there are many other hands working together behind a finished piece: the man who does the waxing, the people preparing the piece, which involves burning wax and getting the bronze, and the finishers. I rescued what was important to me aesthetically, leaving the evidence of intellectual processes and decisions of the other hands and heads involved because they respond to certain needs that have to do with each unique piece.