Emili Armengol: "In women and in the sea is the origin of everything"

The sculptor Emili Armengol (Barcelona, ​​1943) is a creator well known for his monumental sculptures, through which one can travel from Barcelona (La Porta de Sarrià) to the desert of San Luis Potosí, in Mexico, passing through Lausanne or Salses.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
09 March 2023 Thursday 13:35
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Emili Armengol: "In women and in the sea is the origin of everything"

The sculptor Emili Armengol (Barcelona, ​​1943) is a creator well known for his monumental sculptures, through which one can travel from Barcelona (La Porta de Sarrià) to the desert of San Luis Potosí, in Mexico, passing through Lausanne or Salses. , where in 2003 he erected the Porta dels Països Catalans. His last great public work is La porte de la liberté (2019), dedicated to the memory of the Republicans who, fleeing Francoism, ended up in the internment camps on the beaches of Le Barcarès.

Not at all given to the solemn, a quality that seems ridiculous in an artist, Armengol classifies his work between those works that he calls haute couture and prêt-à-porter. In the first group would be, among others, the aforementioned public works, the result of an exercise in empathy "in which I try to put myself in the shoes of the person doing the commission without renouncing my principles," he explains. The prêt-à-porter ones are those that arise when, alone in his workshop, “I let out what I carry inside without thinking about anything. I don't want to say that one thing is better than the other, but the latter is what I like and amuse me the most, and in this job the most important thing is to have fun”,

The works collected under the title Origins belong to this last group and are on display at the Reial Cercle Artístic until April 10. "It's a kind of return to my hometown," says the artist whose last exhibition in Barcelona dates back 23 years at the 3 Punts gallery. "It's one of those mysteries for which I have no explanation," he comments, as if wanting to remove iron from a void that contrasts with his regular presence both in different parts of the Catalan geography and outside of Spain (in 2007 he was named Chevalier de l' Order of Arts and Letters).

In any case, the Armengol who returns at the age of 80 does so without nostalgia, with the desire to show the last chapter of his career up to now, his recent work, which he accompanies pieces from earlier times with which he traces the progression of his career. job. The origins of the title refer to the origins, to which he always returns, and which in his case have to do with that Mediterranean that takes the form of a fish or a woman's silhouette. “We come from the sea and from a mother, there is the origin of life, of everything”, he points out. The son of a jeweler and painter father, with whom he went sailing since he was a child, he knows the different species of fish inside out, which he already drew as a teenager, and he is fascinated by their rare ability “to even sleep floating. They are the most abstract of nature. I believe that at the moment of creation, when it was time for the fish, God lost the pot. But, I'm not Darwin, just a sculptor”, he laughs.