Creating for more than three decades, Mexican sculptor Jorge Yázpik (Mexico City, 1955), has defied different elements, turning them into abstract sculptures and exhibiting them on tables, floors, walls, and in different and varied positions, always true to the taste of the artist, the moment, and the spaces, without neglecting public areas, where they seem to rest as if they had been created there.
The core of his work is the approach to material, focusing on its natural shapes and negotiating with it and the limits established. Direct carving, often without models or mock-ups (especially when talking about carving on rock). Imagination, the other pillar, always open to possibilities. His works adapt to the versatile use of space and functionality, while keeping an essential individuality, even though the artist is reluctant to providing them with a unique direction.
Stone sculptures reflect the ancient legacy of art and architecture, empty and maze-like spaces, armed geometrically with rock’s organic outline, creating integration between opposites. The artist employs a non symbolic language made of visual elements and special proportions, language that precedes words and images when speaking. Yázpik involves the spectator in visual, tactile, special, and architectural ways.
Some of his works combine elements like water, light, vegetation, and the surrounding structures. But monumentality is not exclusive to his large scale work; regardless of their dimension, all his sculptures demand a direct commitment with the surrounding, where they rest as an imperturbable presence, holding movement and tranquility, corporality and emptiness, origin and destination.
His work has been shown internationally, in individual and collective exhibitions, in places like Soumaya Museum, Modern Art Museum, Rufino Tamayo Museum, Diego Rivera Museum (Anahuacalli) and Casa Barragán in Mexico City; Modern Art Museum in Cali, Colombia; Fine Art National Museum in Montevideo Uruguay; Petit Palais in Paris; Expo 2000 in Hannover, Germany; and Expo Milano 2015, Italy.
Starting on April 4th and for the following three months, part of Jorge Yázpik’s diverse work will be showing in Grupo Arca’s new Design Center in Guadalajara.