Dialogue with Vulcan was the title that José Abad (La Laguna 1942-2025) gave to a series of sculptural and collage artworks he created between 2021 and 2024, as he had done on other occasions. The stimulus and reference for these artworks came from the eruption of the Tajogaite volcano on the island of La Palma. Images of this volcanic activity were incorporated into a broad sequence of collages with the same title alongside those of the monumental sculpture made of corten steel created for Espacio Mutua Tinerfeña, where his last major exhibition was to take place, which closed a few months before his death.
Madreyerro, the culminating creative statement of José Abad, embodies a profound effort driven by the enthusiasm and artistic impulse that defined his life during the exhibition’s preparation. This show revisited and celebrated a rich body of work produced over the previous decade, thoughtfully complemented by pieces newly created or reinterpreted expressly for this presentation.
If Madreyerro became an unexpected farewell, the exhibition Dialogues with Vulcan at Galería Artizar welcomes Abad’s work into its legacy, adding his name to the gallery’s artistic roster with the full support of his estate. Both titles, Dialogues with Vulcan and Madreyerro, are coherent and complementary. While the latter refers to a lifelong filial bond, the former reveals the underlying framework for understanding Abad’s work and his approach to it.
Long before the moment of elemental order that inspired the series, José Abad was already in dialogue with Vulcan —the god of fire and earth, as well as the forge where the gods’ weapons and armour were crafted. This dialogue spanned the time from the artist’s first encounter with the fire of the forge and welding to create his initial “armours” and “weapons.” This extraordinarily fruitful exchange would shape his entire life, establishing him as one of the key sculptors of Canarian modernity, leaving a significant mark on the Spanish art scene in the last third of the twentieth century.
Although most of the iron sculptures exhibited in Dialogues with Vulcan belong to the last decade of his work, we have chosen to include some pieces that take us back to the early stages of his dialogue with the material. These early works reference artistic languages (Gargallo, Julio González) with which Abad, not yet twenty years old, identified and began to recognise himself. Pensador (‘Thinker’ – 1961) and Tauromaquia (‘Bullfighting’ – 1962) are key works from the dawn of Abad’s sculptural career. The economy of materials, combined with assembly and recycling—using metal scraps and waste collected from local workshops—provided the humble means to achieve maximum expressive intensity. In Pensador, he creates a body formed by rusted lines, resembling a three-dimensional drawing, while the eight variations that make up Tauromaquia are approached as a model building kit with pieces of welded iron, evoking the figure of the bull in different forms. The works in this preliminary series were painted black, incorporating this material element into his sculpture, a practice that would continue for over a decade. He eventually abandoned it after the exhaustive and striking experience of Homenaje al Barroco (‘Homage to the Baroque’) and its extensive follow-up, including large altarpieces (Adeje, 1979; Tuineje, 1981, etc.). This entire body of work was created using wood and recycled objects, all painted entirely black. This legendary installation exhibition was first presented in 1978 in Madrid at the Glass Palace, and in the following years it toured various national and international galleries, art fairs (FIAC, ARCO), and culminated in 1982 with his participation in the Spanish pavilion at the XI Venice Biennale.
But returning to Dialogues with Vulcan… a painted iron sculpture belonging to the Armas para la paz (‘Weapons for peace’) series, perhaps his most emblematic exhibition and work from the 1960s, completes the selection of early pieces included in this exhibition at Artizar. El dictador (‘The dictator’ – 1966) is one of his most representative artworks from that era, at a time when Spanish art was treading a path of emotional and militant repudiation, filling the last fifteen years of Franco’s dictatorial regime with social content, as Spain entered the history of universal contemporary art.
A leap of five or six decades brings us back to the final stage of Abad’s career. Pieces such as Proyecto de monumento para un borrachito lagunero (‘Projected monument for a drunkard from La Laguna’ – 2016), Cara con dos lenguas es mala de guardar (‘A face with two tongues is hard to keep’ – 2022/23) and De erótica (2019/22) stand out as exemplary works from his final iron sculptures. All were personally selected by the artist to be included in Madreyerro, representing fragments of his sculptural testament.
Wood was another key material for José Abad, carrying as much weight as iron in his work, especially when considering the cycle centred on the Baroque. It was the first medium he used when seeking to give an aesthetic soul to material, and although he would go on to create works of imposing magnitude with it (Cerca de Mogán – ‘Near Mogán’ – 1988), it was fundamental in a space that could be described as one of creative intimacy. Several examples of this are present in Dialogues with Vulcan, objects made from wood, generally recycled or repurposed, which the artist has created with his own two hands in the solitude of the workshop, concentrating the essence of his creativity. A larger sculpture titled Once cantores (‘Eleven Singers’ – 2017),a playful piece made from Canary pine wood with bird-like beaks that create an illusion of movement and song, completes this brief foray into his dialogue with wood.
This present exhibition at Artizar closes with a selection of his works on paper. José Abad often chose to express himself through drawing and collage, which in this latter case became one of the key hallmarks of his artistry. The Dialogues with Vulcan exhibition also includes the two great, complex collages the artist completed as part of Madreyerro, bearing witness to a series he hoped would become more extensive, but which he was unable to complete.
