Ángel Bados, the affectivity of sculpture conquers Bilbao

The title in itself is a declaration of intent.: Against oblivion. Tributes and offerings. In this way, references and dedications are combined (such as to the painter Isabel Baquedano or the writer Robert Walser), to their sculptor friends, to people present and absent, and even to those migrants who risk their lives on inhospitable journeys across the sea.

The whole becomes a sculpture garden or archipelago to travel through; thirty pieces distributed between the floor and the wall, which provide a feeling of celebration, but also a certain sense of mourning or contingency.

Bados is an artist of the duration as resistance to perishable time. The freedom that experience grants is expressed in a refined way. The works seem simple but they have been carried out over a long period of time, from 2001 to the present.

His being, its ontology has been slowly thickening in the artist’s gaze in the workshop until, one day, they seem to have exclaimed: “I’m finished!” All of them combine the abstract condition of the structure with the physicality of the material; modest materials (pieces of cut wood, industrial packaging cardboard, stones from the mountain, photocopies, plastic sheets and plaster), along with everyday objects such as Savoy-style vases and more elegant fabrics, silks and scarves that refer to the outfit.

These three-dimensional collages fascinate by their cohesion as objects without an inner core. Its essence lies in style, its layers do not envelop anything but themselves. Arab culture and art are present in gathered and knotted scarves, almost turbans, or in the verses of Al-Russafi of Valencia.

Sumptuous and formally serenethese pieces also house social content inside, not only in titles like For both sides of the border, If the sea could be made of gardens o Departure coast: Inspecting the enlarged, meticulously folded color photocopies, we glimpse news from the Maghreb, of tragedy and violence, at the same time that we are denied access to their content.

It is as if instead of closing his eyes, the sculptor seems to respond to the media obscenity of all the terrible images of war that sneak into our retinas today.

Ángel Bados has always defended classical culture and its timeless proportions. And yet He is a postmodern artistan “orphan of the stories of totality” that privileges the intimacy of the small and the horizontality over the vertical.

Georges Didi-Huberman once wrote that the great mistake often consists in thinking that we only look with our eyes: you look with your whole bodyand secondly with language. Affects are bodily sensations and this sculpture exhibition is a magnificent case of this.

Its contemporaneity emphasizes one of the features that make art today a work against the current: the singularity.