Dreamtime 2008 sculpture Sculpture by Manuel R Surrealist

"Manuel is a virtuoso artist, a “wizard” of marble, I would say. He knows marble like very few people do, but does not surrender himself to his facility with it. His idiolect is surrealistic, it yields fluid forms which are eternally in motion. He coils his forms around axes of symmetry with a lyricism and a sarcastic tone, with humour and, indeed, with a disposition towards illuminating the inner aspect of things, the anima rerum (the soul of things), like the Romans used to say.
He chooses different coloring styles and materials which are incompatible with each other: he combines natural rocks with metal; he combines glass with marble or solid pieces, materials through which the sculptor acts as a copper caster. There is a great difference between the two: the sculptor extracts volume until he gets to the final phase of the work; the copper caster designs and insists upon details, he passes his form on to wax (cire perdue is a very old method), he turns the wax upside-down, the wax’s place eventually being taken by copper. We say, then, that this creator insisits upon the Plastic Art and disociates marble sculpture from the philosophy of coper casting, that is, from approaching the material in order to give prominent details. Because, what else, if anything, does a work of art do other than express the style, the character, details, a dimension of life and ways of thinking?"

• Nationality: GREECE
• Date of birth : 1963
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Contemporary Greek Artists