São Paulo, Brasil
29/03/2014 - 30/04/2014

When sculpting, Juan Asensio defines shapes until they are so beautiful that they mark his quest for perfection. By combining control over the material and a clear objective of what one wants with it, the Spanish artist has become, in the contemporary art scene, one of the few sculptors who stand out for their classic beauty and the primary essence of their materials.

For the first time, Juan Asensio’s sculptures will be exhibited in Brazil, starting on March 29, at Dan Galeria. After sharing the room with artists like Picasso, Pollock, Kiefer and Anish Kapoor, at the Reina Sofia museum, in Madrid, and at the Gallerie Beyeller, in Switzerland, Asensio arrives in São Paulo a few days before SP-Arte/2014, for the shows “Infinite Geometry”. In addition to the opening, Dan Galeria also celebrates the exhibition and the artist’s arrival with a brunch during the fair, on Friday, April 4th.

The approximately 50 sculptures on display in the gallery, made of granite and marble, have such power and magnificence that they dwarf visitors. There are several stages of production of these works; starting with the drawing, which outlines a first idea. Then, the difficulty of drawing volumes appears in the second stage of production, when Asensio sculpts pieces of chalk. Hundreds of tests and variations are made, which are saved or thrown away to move on to the next stage, that of the model. Made of stone, they allow you to see the features of the sculpture in large size. “The surfaces come into tension, the lines define themselves and you start to realize in your heart that there is something there, you feel emotion and euphoria, it’s a wonderful moment and difficult to explain. The work is practically finished. Even so, I leave these models leaning somewhere so that they can rest for a while before being enlarged”, says the artist in an interview with Rafael Sierra, who will be part of the exhibition’s catalogue.

Formal simplicity, timelessness and the unity of man with nature are elements of Asensio’s work inherited from artists such as Brancusi, Anish Kapoor and Noguchi. Baroque and Renaissance are also recurrent links with the artist’s aesthetic, due to the material, stone, a classic element of art. For the artist, however, the material itself is only the physical body through which an idea is conveyed: “many, in order to assert themselves in their modernity, rely on the use of avant-garde materials and technologies that often hide the lack of interest of a work”.

Born in Cuenca, Spain, in 1959, Juan Asensio began to discover the textures of white marble, black marble from Belgium and black marble from Zimbabwe, his main raw materials until today, in the 1980s. Internationally represented by the Spanish gallery At the end of 2012, Elvira González, Asensio joined the Dan Galeria team.