ARTISTS Sculptors (Regionalist Realisms)

Author: Asorey, Xosé Eiroa, Cristino Mallo, etc
Publisher: NOVAGALICIA EDICIONS
Publication Date: 2004-12-01
Features: This volume gathers a series of artists that have been extremely important in the innovative process of Galician sculpture that was previous to the Civil War in 1936, a process that is parallel to the avant-garde rebirth of the Os Novos generation in painting—our particular 1927 generation, which contrasts with the previous modernism—whose protagonists offer a moderate view from stylistic positions based on a tradition that rebels against the customary topic and admits the interference of certain realities of contemporaneity, mainly of the Expressionism and the figurative reviews of the Cubism. We will have to look for the genesis of these artists in some constants that mark the specificity of their work: tradition, which goes back to the forts' quarrymen and to all the stone workers, to those who carved the popular religious images in tympana, stone crosses, capitals, etc. Granite and wood will be their basic materials. The formal references to the Romanesque and the Baroque are the product of an investigation, linked to the origin of what they consider an artistic identity, which is to discover the anthropological essences of the countryside, the roots of a millenary culture that leads us to the primitivism that is reflected in the formal style: the sculptor, above all, is a good psychologist and, as such, he deepens in the soul of that timeless portrait that places us in Galicia and in the world at the same time.