Page 90 - I Love Art : 64 Contemporary Artists

Sacal

Lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico
www.josesacal.com | www.facebook.com/JOSESACAL

The first time I saw Jose Sacal’s bronze sculpture installed in the Jingan District in Shanghai, where
on the Puerta Roja website I fell in love with his he molded gigantic human figures into machine-
work. His human figurines seem to be alive with like monuments that seem to declaim the glory
an ancient vitality that connects to Mexico’s pre- of modernity. Yet the subject matter of Sacal’s
Columbian civilizations. True, Maestro Sacal is works never veers far from the central concerns of
one of Mexico’s most recognized contemporary humanity – beauty, love, compassion, forgiveness
artists, with over eighty individual and collective – and looking at the Great Masters series, which
exhibitions around the world, and is rightly feature such 20th century luminaries as Frida Kahlo
regarded as a leader in contemporary Mexican and Raúl Anguiano, there is an aura about these
art. True, one can detect surrealist influence in statuettes that is utterly chthonic and reaches
some of his public artworks, such as “Torse III” deep into Mexico’s collective unconscious.

 CaStro, 2007 bRONZE 30,5x38,5x17,5 IN. | 78x98x45 CM.  Che GUeVara, 2007 bRONZE 30x38x17 IN. | 78x98x45 CM.
90