ANTON ALVAREZ
HONEY
21 May – 25 September 2022
Throughout
the ages, sculptural art and its conventions has embodied various meanings:
portraits, memories and monuments, decorations and architectural elements.
Sculptures have taken a figurative expression – depicted and idealised – as
well as non-figurative and abstract expression. What is sculpture? This is a
question that the artist Anton Alvarez (b. 1980) leads us to reflect on.
Sculptures
have a tangible volume and share a physical space with the viewer. At the Millesgården Artist’s Home, Alvarez’s contemporary sculptures encounter
Carl Milles’s works of art and the Antique Collection in a classical setting.
Milles represents tradition and convention. For him, material is subordinate to
form. For Alvarez, on the other hand, form is subordinate to material. Alvarez’s
sculptures take shape unrestrained by convention and without any ambition to
depict. Milles’s passion for classical sculpture, not least his fascination
with columns, is given scope in the dialogue with Alvarez’s fluted, ribbed
sculptures.
Alvarez’s
works can be perceived as having tactile and sensory qualities. Formation is
present in the imagination. The viewer is enticed to look closer, tempted to
touch. This is associated with the contemporary phenomenon of autonomous
sensory meridian response (ASMR), in which intimate and multi-sensory
satisfaction is achieved through visual, auditory, tactile or olfactory
stimulus.
Alvarez
challenges the nature of the traditional work of art by playfully exploring the
boundary between the role of artist and engineer. The artist himself designs
and constructs the tool that creates the work of art and thus removes himself
from its creation. Alvarez’s tool The Extruder is a
large-scale press that squeezes out matter at several tons of pressure through
various profiles and nozzles. The formations become seemingly distorted and
plastic objects.
For
Millesgården’s exhibition in 2022 Alvarez collaborated with the Battaglia Fine
Art Foundry in Milan. There, Alvarez developed his own method, based on the
traditional lost-wax casting process – cire perdue – in which he presses
beeswax in cold water. Depending on pressure, force and
handling, the wax assumes a shape that becomes the final form of the sculpture,
which is then cast in bronze. The lost form, rejected and invisible,
becomes immortalised and visible.