In over three decades of artistic creation, Mexican sculptor Jorge Yázpik has challenged many of the elements that have become hallmarks of abstract sculpture. With works that can present themselves on walls, tabletops or floors, in vertical or horizontal positions (depending on the whim of the artist or the exigencies of the space), and in public works that rest casually on the ground as if they were native to their setting, Yázpik's trajectory has stitched the seam between geometric abstraction and post- minimalism. His works adapt to a versatile use of space and functionality while maintaining an essential individuality. In different scales, the benches constructed as public works for installation in Mexico City's Centro Histórico and the rings he creates in wood, metal, crystal and semi-precious stones, annul the distance between viewer and object, work of art and furniture, personal adornment or Performative tool, becoming the "malleable objects"of contemporary post-conceptual art.
Mentored by Mexican Ruptura artist Manuel Felguérez, one of the pioneers of Mexican Geometrism, Yázpik also acknowledges the influential Mexican artists Gunther Gerzso and Vicente Rojo, while his treatment of negative spaces advances a discourse introduced by Basque sculptors Eduardo Chillida and Jorge Oteiza, Catalan sculptor Julio González and Uruguayan artists Joaquin Torres Garcia and Gonzalo Fonseca. Moreover, Yázpik revisits in a contemporary key the radiance and solemnity of Pre-Columbian sculpture, recovering a volumetric and spatial language whose expressive and conceptual vigor was hindered by centuries of Spanish Colonial rule, with the restriction of sculpture to religious representations.
Central to Yázpik's oeuvre is an approach to materials that focuses on reverence for their natural qualities, on keen observation, and on a negotiation with the limits they impose. His work is often carried out by taille directe, without models, particularly when working with stone. This respect for the medium is often expressed as a subtle subversion, to uncover the material's internal paradox: crystal is subjected to lapidary tooling, like a precious stone, to achieve a more organic, prismatic and elemental appearance than traditional manufacture can produce jade and obsidian are presented in their unpolished majesty, revealing their crystalline luster only through carefully placed internal cuts; wood is ”petrified' into steles; volcanic stone is often surgically deconstructed and reconstructed, preserving its original shape but now unveiling its gravitational burden. Every encounter with the material is approached by Yázpik, in his own words, by ”clearing a path," making great allowances for the fortuitous and accidental element. In the process of "vitalising" natural materials as prima materia, the artist negotiates cuts and carvings in the medium's own native language, in an interplay which is both instinctual and intellectual.
Yázpik’s stone sculptures reflect upon the legacy of ancient art and architecture, particularly Pre-Columbian Atlantean megaliths, stone artifacts and emblematic architectural reliefs, with their focus on native materials and sacred geometries, their hermetic silences and enigmatic graphic expres-siveness. While the artist's additional inspirations derive from the intricate and meditative spaces within the abstract forms of Islamic architecture, as well as the asceticism of Japanese wab-sabi aesthetics, he also acknowledges the enduring legacy of Western Classical art by anchoring his work in the proportions of the Golden Ratio.
Yázpik’s labyrinthine negative spaces, with their precisely incised geometrical surfaces, contrast the organic outer contours of stone, pointing to an integration of opposites. They speak of the coexistence of duality in unity: duality of the organic and inorganic whenever our tactile sense is called upon to explore contradistinctive textures duality in the contrast between a monolithic concentration and a receptive, concave morphology unity in the compact defiance of space and eschewal of symbolic systems and cosmological schemes. Representing nothing but themselves, liberated from Yázpik's works stand autonomously from mental constructs and enter the
recognisable icons to convey formal qualities, the artist employs a non-symbolic language made of visual elements and spatial proportions: a language that precedes words and images to speak to the viewer of mental architectures, homeostasis and immanence, as a repository of sacred knowledge, a memorial to trans-historical time lost in the folds of our collective memory.
Through an exchange between the material's idiosyncrasy and his own rigorously abstract lexicon, Yázpik engages the viewer visually, tactually, spatially, and architecturally. His site-specific works merge diverse elements of light, water, vegetation, and surrounding structures. Monumentality how-ever, is not exclusive of the artist's large-scale works regardless of dimensions, all of his sculptures demand direct engagement with their environment, in which they abide as an imperturbable presence, juxtaposing and containing movement and stillness, corporeality and nothingness, origin, and destination.
Yázpik's work has been featured internationally in solo and collective exhibitions, including the Museo Soumaya, Museo de Arte Moderno, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Museo Diego Rivera (Anahuacalli), Casa Barragán, Casa Gilardi, México, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Cali, Colombia, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Montevideo, Uruguay, the Petit Palais in Paris, the 2000 Expo Hannover, Germany, and the 2015 Expo Milano, Italy.
Gabriella Boschi Scott, M. A.
