Interview with Mariángeles Lázaro Guil
GUIL works mainly in the field of public sculpture and installation in outdoor spaces. She has a predilection for abstract emotional geometry. She is inspired by nature itself, which he explores mathematically and transforms it with the desire to subvert its apparent forms, those of the human imagination, and the notion of proportion in sculpture. It belongs to the avant-garde of the second half of the 20th century in Andalusia. She has received numerous awards in national and international art competitions for Public Sculpture and Singular Architecture.
Throughout your extensive travels and residencies in countries like Mexico, Israel, Italy, France, and Spain, how have these diverse cultural experiences influenced your approach to sculpture, particularly in your exploration of abstract emotional geometry?
Since I was little, I created remote images of feelings that encouraged me to travel with a strong desire for adventure and I liked being alone because I felt free in a more open and poetic world than the one that surrounded me in reality, but the physical environment has always transformed my artistic vision.
As I remember such diverse cultural experiences, my mind travels metaphorically to my own past, but also to those previous times in each of these countries. These two parallel axes that evolve together have been constant throughout my career as a professional visual artist.
The great Mexico City, in which I lived to complete my training as a sculptor, provides the most emotional and influential experience of all. My works of art in the Ralli Museum of Caesarea in Israel continue with purely sculptural aspects and love for the sculptor's craft, but Italy, France and my own country have referred me to the mathematical and aesthetic principles with which nature is observed in the oldest classical cultures of the Mediterranean. I like to reinvent the classic orders.
You began your career as an assistant in the model workshop of the geometrist Mathías Goeritz in Mexico City. How did this mentorship shape your early artistic development and your eventual focus on public sculpture and installation in outdoor spaces?
When I met Mathias Goeritz, he was undergoing medical treatment for serious health problems. He traveled frequently to the United States and we weren't able to spend much time working together, although with his precise templates, that wasn't a problem. When he inspected my work, beyond making me participate in his cult of primitivism, he always preferred to talk to me about his artistic experiences in Andalusia and for me to tell him news about Granada. He advised me to always alternate sculpture with painting, and I obeyed him. He showed me a path to community art from the social principles of the Bauhaus, which I still practice regularly. Not only that, but he introduced me to Manuel Felguerez in Guadalajara and his great friend, the sculptor Ángela Gurría, who recently passed away, who gave me access to quarries, foundries, carpentry shops, blacksmith shops and other professional services for sculptors. He planted in me the seed of courage to intervene in public spaces, integrating nature with art, and also instructed me for a very short time in the creation of my own Singular Architecture. As in my "Ornamental Gate of the West,", Almería, 2007, which is inspired by a jellyfish. He has been the ideal tutor. Mathias Goeritz has visually trained numerous artists in Mexico.
Your artistic journey is marked by a transition from a focus on human nature to a deeper engagement with environmental themes, utilizing color and fractal forms. What prompted this shift in your artistic focus, and how do you see your work contributing to contemporary discussions on environmental management and sustainability?
I believe that this transition occurs because my visual education and my experience with materials are based on abstract thinking and not on the cultural aspects of human action, its philosophy and its paradigms. That same thought that made human beings evolve from the scavenger phase, manufacturing hunting tools with the fangs of animals stronger than him.
On the other hand, I belong to the generation of the 20th century that is educated in environmental or ecological ethics, environmental justice, and even political ecology. I feel like a constitutive part of nature, and I assume creative approaches as a social responsibility. I frequently accompany the exhibition of my public works with demonstrations of Community Art in which young and old participate in creative and exciting work, projecting an experience in which the borders between the object and the wildness of the environment disappear. I am currently creating works of art with recycled noble materials, which come from industrial or engineering objects. As for the themes, I try to focus on the life of the oceans and the massive felling of trees.
Your works, such as the monumental sculptures "Strike of 70" in Granada and "Tolerance" in Almería, carry significant socio-political messages. Can you discuss the process of conceptualizing these pieces and the role of public art in engaging with and influencing public memory and political discourse?
The common factor in these two urban spaces is that art fulfills an educational mission. Symbols are created so that we do not forget what happened, and the new generations know the facts. Together, we must ensure that barbarism is not repeated. Cities, then, build their memory and exhibit the values that cement their collective identity and their identity as a people.
The messages of each of these monumental works of art are very different, both because of the historical moments they represent and because of the social dimension of human events. In Granada the strike that caused the legalization of unions and political parties in the history of Spain is represented, because democracy was close, but the dictator Franco had not yet died. This monument to the “Strike of the 70s” is located in the same place where the confrontation between state security forces and construction workers took place. There were four dead and many injured. It is the confluence of three streets where I have placed a 7-meter-high white marble prism with a triangular base, where scenes of police beating protesters are represented in relief. These characters are repeated from three different perspectives, and the viewer can feel that they are joining the demonstration or going ahead of it.
The sculptural space of Almería addresses a global conflict with much more atrocious consequences. I have felt it from the beginning as a sacred place dedicated to the memory of the victims of Nazism. The “Tolerance” monument, sculpted in stone and occupying a large area next to the sea, represents an open-air temple on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea that does not need to be dedicated to any god. You will be able to move freely through the space and hug the bodies of the columns that represent the 142 victims of this city, who died in the Mauthausen concentration camp.
You have stated that "there is no creative border between geometric abstraction and more elaborate figurative" in your work. Could you elaborate on how you navigate these two artistic approaches and how they coexist within your creative process?
I always use geometric coordinates to represent any planar or volumetric shape in real or imaginary space. I apply scales from micro-geometry to macro-geometry. If I am going to sculpt or paint an eye, for example, what I see is a sphere or a circle radiating from a center with its axis; the more precise and dense its geometry, the more natural expressions I can represent. What attracts and amuses me the most is abstracting this appearance to the limit of representing only the axes and coordinates, stripping the volume of its most apparent surfaces, as seen in my sculpture “The Flight," where the wings themselves can be those of a bird, insect, butterfly, goddess, or angel. Thus, if he had depicted the wings of realistic figures, they would be representative of a single figure. This process is reversible, and I can also make the points more dense on a surface, layer by layer, as if they were fibers. That is precisely what nature does, and that is why the first thing we see of the human body is the skin. The brains of artists who achieve correct visual education end up functioning like scanners.
With a career that spans over several decades, you have mastered numerous artistic techniques and worked with a variety of materials. How do you choose the right material and technique for each project, and how has your approach to materiality evolved over time?
For me, the correct choice of material is very important, especially in public art interventions where construction safety, durability, resistance to inclement weather, and maintenance of the work of art must be guaranteed, among many other expressive factors that I may need to implement.
I am present throughout the entire construction process of my work, from the first drawing to the last detail in its finish. If other professionals intervene, they are directed by me, and that is why it is so important that I make an accurate model with which other people can understand how the final result is obtained. I often choose the same type of material with which the final work will be done. I am educated in materials, and I am a hard-working artist, always willing to undertake enormous experiments that are not far from artistic engineering when it comes to large projects. Stone is one of the materials that lasts the most throughout history and contains a strong symbolic charge. Metals allow for lighter and more dynamic constructions. I associate wood with more delicate shapes and soft textures. The group of moldable materials is very useful for combining textures, wet material engraving and dry carving. I could refer to many other materials, but I want to highlight those that we should not modify or process and that we take directly from nature, as is the case in my work “The Tree and Astronomy," made with shade tree bark.
One of your itinerant works, "Au Ritmo del Flamenco," was exhibited in front of the Hassan II Mosque of Casablanca. Can you share the inspiration behind this work and the experience of presenting your art in such a culturally and historically significant context?
The work has stopped being itinerant when it was acquired by a private collector, but the first time it was exhibited by the Hassan II Foundation, which is located next to the mosque in the context of the Women's Art World (W.A.W.) exhibition in 2013, the music that is preserved in Andalusia includes rhythms, dances and musical instruments originating from the Maghreb. That is why this sculpture was ideal to achieve a rapprochement between the two cultures from the perspective of contemporary art. So in the midst of the movements of metal, geometric lines or colors with a kinetic effect, I tried to invite the viewer on a captivating journey where emotion mixes with the mystery of intuition of the rhythmic order in the succession or occurrence of things. This term is fundamental in music, and in particular in flamenco, but also in my sculpture.
Looking to the future, how do you envision the evolution of your artistic practice? Are there new themes, materials, or techniques you are eager to explore, and what legacy do you hope to leave through your public sculptures and installations?
I continue with explorations of geometry and color that have their roots in Ancient Greece. Thus, the constructive is at the base of architecture and sculpture because I have learned to identify all forms by a precise order of points in space, but color is at the base of the volume and is projected in the shadows and in the lights of all materials. I have long been interested in the fractal aspect of Nature and science. The fact of chance in my work is therefore limited to that which comes from experimentation with materials. Understanding mathematical synthesis in the creative process allows me to explore phenomena that structure space. It is “Vital Geometry”. My favorite material is aluminum. It is the best possible choice for weathering because of its great resistance to corrosion and climatic variations, its lightness for installation, and the way it adapts and integrates various processing techniques. Today I am in charge of creating an art that I want to call REACTION, which is based on the maximum use of materials and their conservation, where the public becomes a community artist who will intervene in the artistic message of the work. I promise.
Gallery: https://www.kaleido.art/GUIL
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/escultoraguil/
