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SUBTLE IRONWORKS

Man has always tried to contravene the designs of fate. To hold in place the unstoppable, to levitate the gravid, reverse time, embody the insubstantial. In the end, to go beyond the possibilities that nature had allowed. He wanted to imitate God. He then created the magic and the art. Or the magic of art because they can be the same thing. One need only look closely at the pieces of subtle gravity that Aramis Justiz achieves.

In his work there is an exercise of thaumaturgy based on elements where strength reigns, a heaviness, an inflexibility; to return to us the realized dream of his plan. With his creatures he tries to find his world, that with which he balances what is not found in immediacy or that he does find yet slips away. Our admiration is awoken by observing how the marble, serpentine stone, bronze, wood, materials not at all delicate, concede their grace like silk in the wind, such is the lightness and grace achieved in his pieces.

In contemplating these creatures (birds, women, stars, compacted light?) names of a tradition come readily to mind: Brancusi, Moore, Gelabert, the ablest artificers of the ethereal, of the turgescence and levities in stone. Because from that lineage he descends. However, let us keep in mind, he only descends, reaches his own ways, where sensuality and rationality are balanced to provide subtle meanings about the insular environment that embraces him.

Excelling in their parts, in the first place, the fantasy of his bodies. The ease with which he seems to dominate the hard material to achieve his creations. And, in these, the sensuality of the curve shines, the subtlety of the smoothness, the range of contrast, the elegance of the harmony. But the artist avoids wallowing in the softness that, in the extreme, could weary us; he then introduces roughness, cracking, juxtaposition of materials in principles irreconcilable, so to better recreate the multicolored reality. This voluptuousness of shapes and textures form creatures that incite at contact, to lovingly feel their reliefs, in a pleasure where the sensual and the aesthetic come together in joyous flight.

It is no accident that highlights the dancers, beings who violate the imposition of gravity to rise up in music, like anvils, a domain where the artist, with knowing strikes and vision, he toils, pounds, shapes and polishes to achieve these fantasies in stone and metals that are his works.

It is an exercise in enjoyment and an imaginative challenge to look at the sculptures of Aramis Justiz. A successful adventure of hard, heavy materials converted, by his intelligent hand, into the lightness of beauty, of dreams, of the total freedom of being.

Manuel García Verdecia

Latin American Art Magazine 3
2013