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Andrés Alcántara - sculptor, engraver, painter Torredelcampo, Jaén, 1960.
One of the few Spanish sculptors that still practises direct carving.
Direct carving is an inner feeling
It's more the will to do in a given moment...
obviously the execution.
But in order to carve stone you have no references
and you are confronting something that
already has certain characteristics.
You are confronting a block of stone with
four sides, four sides...
and well, that shapes the whole process.
For me the avant garde and almost all schools of art
that follow Imperial Rome
are a subproduct, an affectation.
Man makes himself. I mean you can't...
now arts are very separated from man, but back then they
were an integral part of the daily rites.
In the same way as cooking the food, or burials,
or thinking in some way about God, thinking that animals were
partly divine and trying to resemble animals,
which is why man painted dressed as an animal.
Even if I lived three lives I would only barely
be able to work with all the stones that you find
in Spain.
And that is only in Spain, imagine in other countries
and in the rest of the world...
And stone is something determining,
it's something geological, much older than man.
Man has been here, or living organisms have been on Earth
very little compared to the geological processes.
I think that the creative process is a reflexive one,
a process of doing, stopping, looking; doing, stopping, looking;
and it's a process in solitude.
I have been doing it for thirty years.
I understand that there have been workshops
in all the historical processes of the Arts,
but I understand the artist as an inner path,
a path of solitude and a path of doing,
or a path of not doing, of despairing,
but always in silence and reflectiveness.
Otherwise it's very difficult to ever achieve anything worthwhile,
at least for me!