Sculpture by Vicente Pérez Gonsálvez at Klein-Schrueder

In an exhibition in Fundación Klein-Schreuder, sculptor Vicente Pérez Gonsálvez presents a series of works in marble. The materials, white, black and red marble, plus some alabaster, are all sourced from stone quarries in Novelda near the sculptor’s home in Alicante Province, Spain.

These works of Vicente Pérez Gonsálvez bring abstract forms to life. Perhaps it would be better to say that they render the inorganic organic. Smooth, highly finished surfaces invite touch, the glide of a hand, a skim of flat fingers, the gentle curves of their solid forms imitating the sensuous and voluptuous. The concave and convex meet in flowing ridges, clearly delineated but never sharp, junctions that create lines that meander across and through the shapes. These lines create rhythms that add life and even identity to abstraction that never wanders far from a summarised human form.

And between the lines are spaces, voids that run through the sculptures, or sometimes merely cavities whose very hollowness create an inner space that might itself be inhabited, might itself be alive. It is these spaces that create sensation and suggest vitality.

The titles are all simple, clear pointers as to where the viewer should start to interpret. There is Dove, Lesbos, Body. There is no attempt to place confusion or doubt about the artist’s motive here. These are living, organic shapes crystallized in a once living, now inorganic material. They thus become accommodating, inviting objects that invite us to be absorbed into their spaces, just like the organisms that created them.

Close inspection of the red marble of one piece in particular reveals several fossils highlighted within the design, amid the patterns of impurities that give the stone its character and pattern. Snails, ammonites and other animals that once inhabited the lake or sea where the marble formed are thus revealed. The remnants of their crystallized life thus become the surface sheen through which Vicente Pérez Gonsálvez offers his life-affirming forms. The result is both emotionally elegant and intellectually satisfying.

These sculptures by Vicente Pérez Gonsálvez are currently on show in Fundación Klein-Schreuder, Cami del Pinar 23, L’Alfas del Pi, Alicante, Spain. The exhibition is open on Sundays from 10am to 2pm.