Mexican sculptor Sebastián likes to twist things, and his Sandymount Strand sculpture is a perfect example, writes Aidan Dunne
Last week, Mexican sculptor Sebastián caught his first glimpse of the work he gave as a gift to Ireland installed in its new home on Sandymount Strand, Dublin. He wasn't able to be here when Awaiting the Mariner was unveiled by Mexican president Vicente Fox last November.
With its elegant form and smooth lines, it's hardly a controversial sculpture, but it did attract some adverse comment at the time, mainly relating to the manner of its arrival - in particular, that it took some residents by surprise. Predictably enough, it has since gained an affectionate nickname: "The Mexican Wave".
Sebastián, a handsome, solidly built man with a distinguished shock of grey hair, professes himself more than happy with the work and its location.
For him, the Sandymount work is relatively small. He routinely works on 20-metre to 40-metre-tall monumental public pieces. His work occupies many prominent sites in Mexico, including Mexico City, where he lives and works, and can also be found in Germany, Switzerland, Egypt and Japan.
He was born in Chihuahua in 1947. His name was Enrique Carvajal, but from the mid-1960s he adopted the pseudonym Sebastián. His art training was conventional, but even a cursory glance at his work suggests he had an instinct for geometry. "I was fond of geometry," he acknowledges. "But I have no formal training in the subject. I studied, on my own, Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry." He brought his training and intuitive mathematical skills to the vogue for op-art and other minimally inclined movements in the late 1960s.
A decisive moment came when Mexico hosted the Olympics in 1968.
"When I began working Mexican art was still dominated by the muralist tradition. What opened the door for me was the Olympics," he says. Various countries donated works of art, and abstraction gained common currency. Sebastián, meanwhile, travelled and worked abroad.
He did not take an obvious path. He began by making a series of extraordinary transformable sculptures, each of which had in common the number 4 in their titles. It refers to a fourth, transformative dimension. All based on the ingenious de-construction of the cube, using a palette of intense colour, they prefigured Rubik's cube, but are considerably more complex and elegant in their intricate transformative geometry.
Now, as Sebastián points out, elaborate computer simulations of every kind of geometric solid are possible, but at that time everything had to be worked out in his head.
His wife, Gabriela, says everything still happens initially in the artist's head, though computers do come into play further along the line.
The various cubes were made as prototypes in paper and cardboard, and subsequently produced in substantial editions in boldly coloured plastic. They are rigorously mathematical objects, but with their bright colours and endless possibilities, they are also irresistibly playful objects.It is a consistent feature of Sebastián's work that he humanises geometry by imbuing it with a certain ludic quality.
This work, he believes, "laid the foundations for my later, monumental sculpture". The scale was vastly different, but the structural principles, the form and the use of colour remained essentially the same. He made his first monumental urban sculpture in 1974, but it wasn't until the early 1980s that he moved decisively into the public arena. He had to take on board architectonic, engineering and industrial design considerations (he also designs chairs) without, as he puts it, "losing the poetic sentiment of the artist".
There is a feeling, in his use of topological forms like the Moebius strip that loops back on itself, of something magical. For him, "the magic is that I bring out the magic in reality, it's the magic of the real, it's just that we are not accustomed to seeing reality in those terms".
While his sculptural language has little in common with the muralist tradition that represented a national style as he grew up, it does relate directly back to a further past, in the form of the pre- Hispanic architecture and the plastic arts, and particularly of buildings and monuments with their strong geometric forms. His use of colour also identifies him with a distinctly Mexican tradition - "relating to the intense sunlight".
Not quite Sandymount Strand, but he likes the endlessly changing light there, and the expansive sea and sky.