Lorenzo Domínguez Villar (1901 – 1963) was a Chilean sculptor and educator.
Introduction Lorenzo Domínguez's art is the antithesis of the idea of "autochthony" and "cultural unity". In fact, his life of constant and lasting migrations across continents and through multiple countries could be used as an example of the limitations of a nationalistic approach to the history of art. He was born in Santiago de Chile in 1901.Pro, D.F. Tiempo de Piedra. Lorenzo Dominguez, pages 15-26. He spent his childhood and adolescence in Santiago, but as a child he stayed for a whole year at a boarding school in Málaga, in southern Spain. During his youth he spent ten years in Madrid, Spain, where he began to sculpt. At thirty, he returned to Santiago de Chile. There, he continued sculpting and began teaching sculpture at the university. During the Spanish Civil War he went to BarcelonaEl Escultor Chileno Lorenzo Dominguez La Vanguardia, Barcelona May 28, 1938. Page 3. for a few months. He then spent a year in Paris, frequenting some famous sculpture workshops. At forty, he moved to Argentina, where he lived for almost twenty years in the cities of Mendoza and Tucumán, teaching at the university and creating sculptures, embossed metal plates and drawings. In January 1960, he traveled to Easter IslandDominguez, L. Las Esculturas de la Isla de Pascua or Rapa Nui, where he spent thirteen months studying the Island's artistic treasures and creating drawings and sculptures of his own. He returned to Argentina in February 1961. In 1963 he died in Mendoza at the age of sixty-one.
Defining him as Chilean, or Argentine or European because of the place in which he was born, or learned to sculpt, or worked, would be reductive. Lorenzo Domínguez was a Latin American artist who lived his artistic life under the sign of certain syncretisms. Before his encounter with Easter Island, the artist synthesized the Spanish and French artistic perspectives acquired during his formative years with certain Latin American pre-Columbian artistic features, like privileging stone over other classical sculpting materials such as bronze or wood, or privileging local stones over the more traditional Carrara marble, or using the technique of direct carving. The encounter with the moais and petroglyphs of Easter Island, is not felt by Lorenzo Domínguez as the incorporation of a "foreign" element, but as a continuity: in his eyes, Easter Island, with its “stones that look like sculptures and its sculptures that look like simple stones” gives form to Michelangelo's dream of "sculpting the mountains", as he says in his Easter Island journals.Domínguez, L. Diario de la Isla de Pascua, 1960-1961. Page 29. Entry for 03/09/1960. The encounter with Easter Island and with an aesthetics signed by both monumentality and line, offers Domínguez the opportunity for a new synthesis of European, Latin American pre-Columbian and Rapa Nui artistic elements.
Artistic production: sculptures, embossed metal plates and drawings Lorenzo Domínguez completed 252 sculptures that have been photographed and described in the 1998 General Catalog.Colavita, F., Colavita A., Digivanni Dominguez, C. Lorenzo Dominguez. General Catalog. Although he worked in a great variety of materials, his preferred sculpting media was stone, mainly because he conceived sculpting as a struggle between the artist and the material resisting him. He thought that "there is no quality in an art that occurs without a struggle", and that materials like clay and plaster are "too soft and obedient",Pro, D.F. Tiempo de Piedra. Lorenzo Dominguez, page 38, while "stone resists, but at the same time cooperates... If there is a struggle, stone itself guides the sculptor's hand"Pro, D.F. Tiempo de Piedra. Lorenzo Dominguez, pages 38-39. Of Lorenzo Domínguez's sculptures 76 are in stone or marble; 34 in bronze; 5 in wood; 9 in ceramics; 13 in cement; and 115 in plaster. Some of these sculptures were public monuments to Santiago Ramón y Cajal,Anaya, A. Cajal en Madrid. La deuda de Madrid con Cajal. Museo, Cátedra e Itinerario. REVISTA ESPAÑOLA DE PATOLOGIA Vol. 35, n.º 4, 2002 to Johann Sebastian Bach,Castillo, R. El temple de Bach, El Mecurio, Santiago de Chile. May 20, 2000 to Louis Pasteur, to Dr. Luis Calvo Mackenna, to Leandro N. Alem, to José de San Martín and Bernardo O'Higgins,Pro, D.F. Lorenzo Dominguez, 1952, pages 69-72 to Dr. Miguel Lillo and to Plato. Many of Lorenzo Domínguez's sculptures are portraits, others belong to his "Planetarium series" ("Portrait of the Moon", "The Planet Venus", "The Planet Saturn", "The Milky Way", "Berenice" and "The Morning Star"Gomez Echea, M. Lorenzo Domínguez, o el Fervor de la Piedra, Los Andes, Mendoza, Argentina. September 3, 1955), some are nudes or torsos, some have existential or metaphysical subjects ("Death", "Hope", "Time Hieroglyph"), some have a political subject ("The Unknown Political Prisoner", "Barcelona", "Peace"), some have religious subjects ("Christ", "The Virgin of Hope", "Saint Olalla"), some are of Latin American inspiration ("Llaima-Llaima", "María Coya", "La Cuyanita"), and some are of Easter Island inspiration ("Father Sebastian Englert from Easter Island" and "Young Girl from Easter Island").
Lorenzo Domínguez created 34 large embossed metal plates.Colavita, F., Colavita A., Digivanni Dominguez, C. Lorenzo Dominguez. General Catalog. This is an aesthetic manifestation that is characteristic of his work. It goes beyond what in sculpture is known as a "relief", since it actually implies blending the art of drawing with that of sculpting. Domínguez incorporated techniques used by jewelers, but instead of working with small, thin, precious metal sheets, he worked with iron or copper plates that were several millimeters thick, with an area ranging from 50 x 30 cm. to 1 x 1 m. The long embossing process began with a chalk drawing on the back of the metal plate. Then, the metal plate was placed over a warm tar cake. Finally, the plate was pounded strongly and repeatedly, either with a rounded hammer or with a combination of hammer and chisel, until massive volumes emerged towards the front of the plate.Pro, D.F. Tiempo de Piedra. Lorenzo Dominguez, page 77,
Lorenzo Domínguez was a draughtsman as well as a sculptor.Pro, D.F. Tiempo de Piedra. Lorenzo Dominguez, pages 89-107, He started to draw more than ten years after he began to sculpt, and along his artistic life he completed approximately 500 drawings. In the 1998 General Catalog these drawings have been photographed and classified in twenty-three thematic series: Standing nudes, Seated nudes, Reclining nudes, Two nudes, Via Crucis of Don Quixote, Portraits, Religious themes, Maternities, Drawings anticipating Easter Island, Stones, Mythology of Chile, Assorted themes, Moais, Make-Makes, Bird Men, Moai hands, Komaris, Easter Island torsos, Birds, the Flying Bird series, the Marine series, Easter Island stones, and Assorted Easter Island themes.
Quotes
For Lorenzo Domínguez, stone is the authentic form of expression of Latin American art: "In Chile, I realized that sculpture in the Americas should be mainly done in stone, as in pre-Columbian times".Pro, D.F. Lorenzo Dominguez, page 31.
Life and work
From 1901 to 1920 (Santiago de Chile and Málaga, Spain)
Lorenzo Domínguez was born in Santiago de Chile, on May 15, 1901. His parents, Sebastián Domínguez Aguilar and Ana Villar Urbano, were from the villages of Colmenar and Casabermeja in the Spanish province of Málaga. As a child Lorenzo Domínguez went to Spain with his parents, and lived in Málaga for a year studying at the Jesuit boarding school of San Estanislao de Kostka, in Miraflores del Palo, Málaga.
From 1920 to 1931 (Madrid, Spain)
Life and cultural context In 1920 Lorenzo Domínguez returned to Spain, where he would stay for the next eleven years.Pro, D.F. Lorenzo Dominguez, pages 15-26. He studied medicine in Madrid for five years. During Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, he frequented two leftist cultural circles ("tertulias"): a scientific and medical group linked to Santiago Ramón y Cajal, winner of the 1906 Nobel Prize for Medicine, and a group of writers and artists associated with the great modernist writer, Ramón del Valle Inclán.Noseda, L. R. Lorenzo Domínguez, page 33 Cajal's group included medical professionals like García del Real, professor of pathology; Juan Negrín, a physiologist and socialist politician who would later become the last President of the Government (Prime Minister) of the Second Spanish Republic; and Pío del Río-Hortega, a famous neuro-histologist who left Spain after the Civil War, dying in Buenos Aires in 1945. Valle Inclán's group included writers and artists like Enrique Díez Canedo, poet and literary critic; Ricardo Baroja, painter; José Gutiérrez Solana, painter and writer; occasionally the poet Antonio Machado; Juan de Echeverría, painter; Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, the bullfighter and writer; Juan de la Encina, art critic; and Manuel Azaña,Um banquete em Madrid em honra do escultor chileno Lorenzo Dominguez, Ilustração Portuguesa, No. 112, August 16, 1930 - page 17 a writer and politician who would later become the last President of the Second Spanish Republic.
Work In 1926, while he was still studying medicine, Lorenzo Domínguez realized that his true vocation was sculpting. From 1926 to 1931 he worked at the art workshops of Juan Cristóbal and Emiliano Barral. Important works from this period include two heads in marble, "Cajal" and "Julia"; a stone portrait of Martín Luis Guzmán, the Mexican writer; and a bronze head called "Young Woman with Short Hair". Also, Domínguez carved a stone monument dedicated to Santiago Ramón y Cajal that is placed at the College of Doctors, or "Ilustre Colegio Oficial de Médicos de Madrid" (Santa Isabel, Nº 51, Madrid). A full size cement copy has been placed at the nearby "Instituto de las Administraciones Públicas".
From 1931 to 1938 (Santiago de Chile, first period)
Life and cultural context In 1931, Lorenzo Domínguez returned to Santiago de ChileBucci E. Sentimiento de lo Americano en la Expresión de la Escultura en le Generación del '40. PHAROS Revista Semestral de la Universidad de las Américas Santiago de Chile May–June 2002 Vol. 9, n.º 1, pages 101-113 and began teaching sculpture at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de Santiago. He befriended other plastic artists like the painters Hernán Gazmuri, Abelardo Bustamante, Inés Puyó and María Tupper, as well as painters from the Montparnasse Group (Camilo Mori, Pablo Burchard, Augusto Eguiluz and Anita Cortés); sculptors like Samuel Román Rojas, Totila Albert and Laura Rodig; poets like Pablo Neruda,Delhez, Victor. Lo Abstracto Fue al Encuentro de Lorenzo Domínguez Por la Senda de lo Primitivo Los Andes. Mendoza, Argentina, March 15, 1964 winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize for Literature, Vicente Huidobro, the vanguardist author responsible for "creacionismo", and Nicanor Parra; writers like the novelists Marta Brunet,Noseda, L. R. Lorenzo Domínguez, page 34 Augusto d'Halmar, Manuel Rojas and Mariano Latorre; musicians like Claudio Arrau, Acario Cotapos, Víctor Tevah and Rosita Renard; and scientists like professor Alejandro Lipschutz. His students included Lily Garáfulic, Marta Colvin, María Bellet and María Fuentealba.
Work