- MAITE CENTOL
- VILLAVICIOSA
- NATALIA PASTOR
- GRADO
- AVELINO SALA
- LUANCO
- ADOLFO MANZANO
- PRAVIA
- PABLO ARMESTO
- COVADONGA
- JUAN CARLOS MARTINEZ
- LUANCO
- CUCO SUÁREZ
- LANGREO
ADOLFO MANZANO
Bárzana de Quirós, 1958
Trained at the School of Arts and Crafts in Oviedo, Manzano took up the practice of sculpture in the company of Daniel Gutiérrez. Revealing an interest for the potential of materials and for the formulations of Constructivism, his early work already expressed a primordial concern for the objectual and for the play of scales prior to his research into other vernaculars that lead to his more mature work, in which we see a resurfacing of that initial interest for the symbolic value of objects, their decontextualisation and ability to dialogue with space from a viewpoint not exempt from irony or social critique.
Project
Just as architecture is underpinned by its condition as a means for the manifestation of power and its will for perpetuity, the repertoire of monumental sculpture also makes use of all available ingredients for the visualization of authority, its media and agents. Every tribute hides a message transcending the event itself, seeking to transform the character to whom the homage is paid into an exemplary model.
Adolfo Manzano creates a connection between the essence of the sculptural monument and children. An ironical transfer of the heroic concept used as an educational model, and those archaizing educational guidelines through which children learn to acknowledge a debt of respect and consideration to their elders.
A formal understanding of citizens as the active subjects of a responsible democracy does not preclude the perpetuation of the original outlines of the monumental, which only bring into question the expressive languages of contemporaneity and new projects of public sculpture. Hence the elevation by the artist of a rocking horse to the category of public monument. Behind the rhetoric of its structure, this Trojan horse contains the dissolving and instructing voices of children reeling off a school text expressly made for the occasion, describing, in a pedagogic style, the historic keys of the public monument and its symbolic desire to occupy the most attractive civic spaces.
