Figure and table

20TH century art was characterised, inter alia, by the abandonment of the figure for the benefit of research on structure. Thus, it is not strange that the icons of this artistic period include the proposals of the constructivists, the works of Naum Gabo or N. Pevsner and the experiments with the virtuality of the volumes by Lazslo Moholy-Nagy which he described so well in his book The New Vision, from Material to Architecture. Here, Zugasti finds some of his closest relatives. But there are more branches of this family that have left their mark on the sculptures of the author: Giacometti’s drawings, sensitivity towards the quality of the colour and texture of the informalists, the penchant of Arte Povera to find poetic values in apparently ignoble materials...
This cross-breeding among kindred is the reason why the first feeling experienced when one sees the sculptures of José Zugasti is a paradoxical one. On the one hand, it almost leads to hold one’s breath for fear that any sudden movement can upset its apparently precarious and fragile balance. But on the other hand, there is surprise from the intense feeling of compactness in its volumes, perfectly drawn by the lines of wire that he crosses masterfully.
His treated and welded wire sculptures remind me of those dried leaves whose soft parts have been eaten by insects, without losing their composure. Those leaves that offer their naked ribs to the rigours of winter and, white from the frost, appear still more fragile and delicate, always at risk of being broken by the foot of a distracted walker.
But I can not cease to admire in them the ease with which they delineate the volumes; the perfect and emphatic geometry of their precarious architecture. See, otherwise, the master cubic definition, in four strokes, the table and the legs of the seated figure, or the accuracy of the double circle with which the torso and the head are defined.
Perhaps it is that double membership (the universe of solidity and volumetric rotundity, on the one hand, and the delicate and poetic game of frosty wire on the other) that makes Zugasti’s sculpture so poetic, so beautiful and so personal .
Imanol Agirre Arriaga