ALBERTO CARNEIRO VISITS UNDER CONSTRUCTION IN HUESCA
Alberto Carneiro recently visited Huesca to oversee work on his piece entitled Ás Árvores Florecem em Huesca. The sculpture will be the sixth in the Art and Nature programme, whose travelling collection includes works by Richard Long, Ulrich Rückriem, Fernando Casás, David Nash, and Siah Armajani.
The work is gradually taking shape under the artistic direction of Javier Maderuelo and the executive supervision of José Miguel Ferrando. The goal is to complete the sculpture in time to mark the closing of the ‘Landscape and Thought’ course, which is being organised by the Centro de Arte y Naturaleza (CDAN) and will be held in Huesca on 26-30 June.
From the seventies on, Alberto Carneiro no longer created works exclusively in the studio or approached projects as installations for galleries and museums. Instead, he began to take some of his creations to the countryside, to landscapes transformed by the labour of agricultural workers. This brought him into closer contact with the territory and landscape (the latter a word that appears frequently in the titles of his works), as well as giving him a greater awareness of the aesthetic value implicit in the work of farmers.
A wanderer in the lands of Huesca, Alberto Carneiro has explored the Pyrenees, the counties of Somontano and Hoya de Huesca, the mountains and valleys, the forests and deserts, to finally find an isolated spot, surrounded by an exceptional landscape. It is there that he has chosen to place the centre of his cosmos by constructing his personal mandala, the work entitled Ás Árvores Florecem em Huesca (Trees Flower in Huesca). Alberto Carneiro has found in the configuration of mandalas a motif for his artistic work that allows him to fuse the aesthetic and conceptual with ideas about ritual and nature, ideas so strongly present in much his work.
Through art and the use of materials that take on form and structure space, Alberto Carneiro has taken possession of the territory of the Belsué Valley, made it his own, and created a marker towards which the gazes and steps of visitors will be drawn. Viewers will be enticed to penetrate, to take part in an experience that engages both their perceptual senses – through forms, materials, and textures – and their cognitive senses, through geometry and words.
Ás Árvores Florecem em Huesca engages with the place by virtue of its presence there and the new meaning it gives its surroundings, as it also engages with the bodies of those who penetrate in its interior. The blind stone walls are not part of the structure of a house or agricultural building; rather they constitute a ‘poetic architecture’, rising up to offer a powerful geometric structure without function, a structure that serves to enclose a metaphorical tree, the bronze sculpture partially visible within a large gnomon, a contemporary menhir.
