“ Tribute to Giacometti “

THE WORLD OF DIMENSIONS

The work of Hamilton Aguiar (Brazil, 1965) has been widely known for his paintings of colorful landscapes of forest and tropical plants, but in recent years he has also begun to explore the territories of sculpture. The project in front us now, is a sculptural project where Aguiar has worked intensely in the past year. It is a reflection on two sculptural icons of the modernist Avant-garde by the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti (Switzerland, 1901-1966). It is a reflection on how the dimension constitutes in itself a temporal space value of human expression. A value that translated into images affects our perception in the contradictory development of contemporary culture.

Hamilton Aguiar takes the sculptures ”Le Chien” (1951) and ”L’Homme qui marche” (1961) by Giacometti to recreate in an amplified manner the figurative expression of both sculptures. If Giacometti’s ”L’Homme qui marche” is only as big as 1.83 x 25.5 x 0.95 meters, Aguiar's ‘Alberto’ (2018-2019) on the other hand, reaches the dimensions of 3.35 x 2.54 x 0.81 meters. These measures in the sculpture of Aguiar doubles Giacometti’s sculpture in which it is inspired. The viewer feels an intense expressive shock when placed in front of it. The sculpture made of steel has rough skin where you can see the texture of the steel worked by Aguiar as an element of symbolic expression. A welding that, layer by layer, advances giving volume to the muscles of this shocking human body. Cuts and incisions are visible in this textures that make the skin glow when the light is projected on them, giving the sensation of a strange movement on the joints of this man who walks, nobody knows where.

The monumentality of this sculpture by Aguiar makes us think of a humanity that seeks to rediscover the measures of things to find a new meaning in life. It is a skinny body sculpture that describes an act as continuous as walking. But here that huge silhouette (whose thinness recalls Cervantes' descriptions of his Quixote) makes us perceive that walk as a symbol of human loneliness. That is the emotion we sense when we see the enormity of that body "moving forward", slightly curled forward, with the gaze lost on the horizon. It is a body, whose enormous height is topped by a countenance with the moored features, emerging an expression that becomes disconsolate. Face and body in the key of neo-expressionist language that, in Aguiar’s recreation and far from ironizing, emphasizes the conflict and despair that the contemporary being in the work of Giacometti lives, when he is pushed to live in the open Social.

Hamilton Aguiar replicates this act of aesthetic appropriation by also recreating the work by Giacometti ”Le Chien” (1951). Inspired by it, he sculpts a 1.5x 3.35 x 0.40 meters dog that vastly overflows the dimensions of Giacometti's original work. It is a sculpture in steel titled ‘Me’ (2019) whose over enlargement affects the anatomical features of the dog. The visual effect is as if you were zooming in on a sloppy animal, a dog that remains only the skeleton of it as it walks. Keeping only those essential features of bones, supported by ragged legs. These characteristics, narrated from an expressive enlargement of them, convey the feeling of listening to the story of this dog that seems irrecoverable for life, but through an amplifier. A story that at capillary scale, gloats in the resized expression that brings us closer to the details, to over-expose the depauperation suffered by the animal wrapped in loneliness. The viewer is accordingly trapped in the psychological details of expression in its most primitive crudeness. In both sculptures (Alberto and Me, Walking to find my self) a perception of the world by our senses is affected by the values of dimension. This reflection seems to tell us that our emotions and our judgments understanding the contemporary world, as well as our criteria and our opinions, are increasingly subject to the way we assume an image and its dimension.

Dennys Matos

Art critic, Art curator

Lives in Miami and Spain