Art Office

At the same time that Víctor Santamarina moved his studio to an icy and dilapidated anti-squat building, he visited the exhibition on lobe in the Rijksmuseum. It led him to a unique plan: “Inspired by the organic volumes and drops of lobe tableware, I began to think about hollow and openwork bodies that burst and leak, just like the building in which I worked. By confronting these two realities with the use of a new material technique - aluminum casting - I want to give a different twist to my relationship and experience with the sculpture practice.” Santamarina wanted to learn to cast aluminum herself and build a metal furnace. He would like to conduct art historical research on lobe, then develop shapes and volumes reminiscent of abstract hybrid bodies and objects. With this he wants to enrich his visual language and examine the position of the body in contemporary society.

Santamarina makes sculptures with references to the human body and a leading role for the use of materials, the layers and skin in which shadows of muscle mass lie. At the same time, they seem to be a solidification of his thoughts and dreams. You recognize a fascination for the fluid, unstable and grotesque, something to which the 17th-century lobe connects. According to the R&D committee, it was obvious that this project would give the artist new developments.

This started an intensive work process. Building the kiln turned out to be complex and when learning how to cast, Santamarina noticed that his initial ideas turned out differently, but the capriciousness and imperfections at the same time gave room for new forms. He decided to focus less on the lobe history and more on the idea of ​​leakage as part of the process, and on the body in relation to the building. Corona made it difficult to exhibit, a planned trip to Scotland was cancelled, the studio building turned out to be less suitable, but with the results he made an installation in the basement of A Tale of a Tub in the autumn of 2020 to great satisfaction.