The classical architect Vitruvius used the term eurythmy to designate a happy linkage of proportions, a symmetry or modulation that produces an effect that is not only harmonic, but also symphonic and organic. In Marc Sparfel's sculpture, these same dynamic processes of movement, growth and change take place; because they are designs that gravitate between geometric rigor and the expansion of trees, between wood and air, between shapes and empty space. Each sculpture is a defined entity, but these entities do not end there, rather they are in perpetual communication with a void that their forms, in an enveloping movement, want to capture and, in a certain way, define.

 

His creative process begins with the clash of two insignificant bodies, simple remnants of wood, which together grow unlimitedly in an exercise in tension, folds and experimentation. A line of work that seems to descend from the tradition of non-monolithic sculpture arising from cubist collage, whose originality lies in denying weight, lowering and raising what has no value. Thus, in the face of the radical geometry of the great milestones of the 20th century, his work will demand a humanization whose referents come from below, from what is left over. A distracted art, never without a powerful emotion and with an architectural sense that reminds us of the great Merzebau cathedral made by the German artist Kurt Schwitters.

 

None of his works responds to more coordinates than those of composition, and yet they seem to be closely linked to a certain idea of nature. Sparfel's sculpture becomes a vector of space that needs to be read with the body, a paradigmatic symbol of human existence, a balanced synthesis between reality — through its material and its relationship with the artist and space — and the ideal — in its formulation according to abstract conventions. Throughout his career he has executed colossal sculptures and small sculptures, revealing his mastery of scale, but also open forms that delimit an absent space and forms closed in on themselves in which the interior space is only insinuated. His research is about real space, about how an object intervenes in its environment and how measurements of everything are necessary to establish relationships. None of its features manages to acquire autonomous value, since each one of the details that defines the outline of its pieces is designed based on the whole, indicating the space, giving meaning to it.

 

Sparfel defends an unmistakable discourse without hiding his learning from the formalist tradition, although he has not allowed himself to be influenced by the alleged "neutrality" of geometry, sometimes so oppressive and hierarchical. He allows his creations to travel along a path where intuition, skill, thought and rigor complement each other with exquisite naturalness. Thus, the geometric begins to tremble, to incorporate wounds and, therefore, to break with the semantics of normative abstraction, opening its vocabulary towards subtle parameters of spontaneity, chance and evocation. For him, improvising is responding to a moment that demands a great structural sense of beauty.

And creating means dominating a pure field in which ideas, universals and hypotheses crystallize, which will necessarily become an aesthetic act.

 

Oscar Manrique Ares