MIRAMONTES, Isabel

This Spanish artist who lives and works in Belgium, creates bronze sculptures with a warm patina. Her works show sketched human bodies, associated with shapes or objects and others, more realistic. In most of her works, emptiness is inviting herself. The body, posture, movement and essence of human life are at the heart of Miramontes’ work.

Sculpture of emptiness

Abstract bodies cut into strips, Isabel Miramontes explores the concept of sculpture. At the height of the usual sculpture, she opposes an apparent emptiness. For her, sculpture is not a block of material to which a shape is given, sculpture is a void to which the artist gives a surface. The body, almost there: Intimidad

The cuts of these characters that evoke the strips of mummies, give the image of a body reduced to its footprint. When it comes to disappearing, there will be only one memory left of the body. This relationship to memory is very present with La Baigneuse  in “early 20th century” bathing suit. The tender form of the body of this woman who tests the water of her big toe seems ready to faint.

We feel the same feeling as in front of an old photo: the protagonists are dead but the bodies vitality is terribly present. This fleeting feeling between appearance and disappearance is also present in the work Intimidad.

The body of passage sometimes becomes invisible: Rendez-vous.  The curve of a lounge chair, a bench, a face and feet suggest the presence of a possible body as a spirit who would have chosen to live there.

The symbolism of emptiness: Corazon. The scope of the characters of Miramontes whose face is only sketched is metaphorical and metaphysical. For Isabel Miramontes, the Human existence, at once concrete and impalpable, is made of flesh and bones and that part of essential emptiness which our emotions constitute.

Miramontes works with the gesture, the posture of this transcended body experience …

Anne DARGENTON