“The humanity that emanates from his work is a quality that he does not wish to give up, because sculpture gives him the power to convert material into an organism with its own life. His sculpture has the gift of converting object into subject by means of a semantic alteration that allows us to see “beings” instead of inert material. In order to make this jump from object to subject, material becomes “someone” who is gifted with a narrative capacity, capable of putting together a discourse.
Walter Benjamin used to say that aura “is the act of giving a gaze to the inanimate”. “To perceive the aura of an object” he adds, “means to invest it with the ability to raise its eyes and give out a cry or a sigh”. During the process of creation, Jordi Cases gives material this aura of which Walter Benjamin speaks.
Irrespective of the meaning we might attribute to each piece, each one of them “is”. Thanks to their different plastic qualities, each work assumes its role of “being”, of a mass with a voice that involves us in the poetic and earthly world per se. Each one of them holds out ties to us that help us to heal our wounds opened up by solitude and a lack of communication. This is one of the qualities that makes us value and love art and helps us to distinguish between a work of art and a well-modelled mass. And these pieces generously offered to us by Cases not only speak but also listen to us. And they allow themselves to “be” what we want them to “be”.
Never are stone and metal as malleable as when they become sculpture: adopting the form of the author’s thoughts and feelings and letting our reason and spirit take shelter under these forms”.
Angels Manzano
