después de la calma

The work of Spanish sculptor Carlos Nicanor is rooted in the surrealist legacy of André Breton, the Dadaists and the word-object of Joseph Kosuth, but it also lays claim to significant heritage from the sculptors and artisans of the Canary Islands. With such a diverse legacy, Nicanor has become so traditional in the sculpted form that the very fact of such excess has raised questions. It is as if he “kneads” the wood to remove any trace of hardness and then presents it as an almost (impossibly) soft, organic, free, loose form, with its own autonomy. His work often defies the physics and logic of the material, along with human sensitivity. It reminds us that art comes from its very handmade nature -without forgetting the intellectual component- and that both the process of firing and perception takes place at a different tempo from that of modern life.

From the moment I first met Carlos Nicanor in 2017, already at a mature stage in his career, I knew he was a genuine artist, which are few and far between these days. It was March, and my own exhibition, Neomismos, was showing at Galería Artizar in Tenerife. I was surprised by three things: his humility; his bold approach to materials and scales; and the poetry in his work. And in Nicanor’s pieces, the execution is as powerful as the idea and sometimes the former often even surpasses or enriches the latter. The choice of materials is part of his statement: wood, metal, thread and paper. They give rise to synaesthetic experiences: Do (sound sculpture, 2011), Instrumento insonoro (Soundless instrument, 2017), Madera líquida en su estado sólido (Liquid wood in its solid state, 2010), Retrato de la Familia iReal (Portrait of the iRoyal Family, 2017-2020), to name just a few examples. Carlos plays with the duality of form and word, and combines them in verses full of irony and sarcasm as a playful resource, so characteristic of islanders.

These paradoxes between image and text are also very visible in his sculpture-installations, in that expanded sculpture that, as Rosalind Krauss conceptualised in the sixties, strains the limits and bursts forth towards another solution that is no longer the traditional one. In these spaces inhabited by the body of the work, silences coexist, and as in music, they are also musical pieces. This was what happened with the piece Icor (Ichor, 2020) exhibited at the Espacio Cultural CajaCanarias. The golden fluid flowing through the veins of gods and immortals, or ichor, was represented by red threads as a synthesis of blood and fluids, but also as a museum laser security system. The passable space became as narrow as the myth it professed. It was said to be toxic to mortals, killing them instantly. With this piece, Nicanor activated the interior space without concealing it and involved the spectator physically.