Article published in Diario Expansión
The steel sculptures of Jordi Díez dialogues with environments as varied as museums, temples, showcases or tables with a Michelin star.
The figurative expression especially the human figure, is the axis on which Jordi’s work revolves Díez (Valladolid, 1966), present in museums, temples, public spaces and private collections from around the world. Its stainless steel parts, its fetish material, they look straight ahead at large cities and corners of nature, but they also decorate the tables of restaurants such as El Celler de Can Roca and ABaC or shop windows like Loewe’s. He is one of the Spanish sculptors with more international projection.
- Why did you choose the figure human as the central axis of his work? strong>
The human figure possesses everything. If you manage to express a human body in depth, you know how to express everything: its passion, its strength, its spirit.
- How do you get that in your works dialogue with the environment in which they are located?
When I undertake a commission I seek to enhance with my work what the environment says and magnify it. Something similar to adding music to a landscape, increasing its presence.
- The immateriality of its pieces is a simile of the fragility of our existence?
It is not clear to me that our existence will be fragile. I believe that the human being is powerful. With immateriality, what I express is a more subtle level of the human being, something like the energy that animates him, his spirit. Steel is a unique material to express the immaterial, due to this possibility of lightness, of seeing the interior, together with its absence of colour.
- How did you get to steel?
I came to it after working a lot with all the materials of my trade such as stone, wood, clay, bronze… Then I went to iron because it forced me to synthesize, but in a short time it began to seem too used, so which I tried with steel. And after five years of using it, I realized that it had become the quintessential material for sculptural expression in my century.
- Have you considered working with recycled materials?
One of the things I look for in my sculpture is to communicate through time, something characteristic of all artistic expression, but that in sculpture has even more power. The purity of the material, its nobility, is also very important to me. By itself it already possesses, and imposes, its own discourse. I don’t know of any recycled material that meets the qualities I need to create a sculpture, but if it appears I’ll use it.
- His work is in spaces various. A pending site where you would like to have a presence?
In any place where my work can inspire other people.
In any place where my work can inspire other people. A poetic response to counter the times we live in. By the way, how does it affect you? professionally the Covid-19?
If the problem settles over time, it may affect international presentations scheduled for the coming months.
- Let’s go back to poetry. His hand has chiseled the tasting spoons used by the Roca or the sculpture in the shape of a bag that he made for Loewe. Why some artists do not want work with brands? Do you feel it devalues your art?
Well, I don’t know. If this is the case, I understand that it is a matter of truly understanding what is being done. When I worked with Loewe, for example, I reinterpreted his most emblematic piece, the Amazona bag. It was a kind of communion with his designer; I immediately realized that the bag responded in everything to the Phi Number, to the Divine Proportion.
- And is fame proportionate of the Spanish sculptors in their homeland with the one they have abroad?
Spain continues to be the spearhead in artistic expansion. I do not believe in the stereotype that it is necessary to leave our country to be recognized in Spain. In addition, we are going through a stage in which the trade, good work, is valued again. We live in a fertile time that will give great milestones in the history of art.
