ELEGY IN GRANITE, ISLAND OF SCULPTURES


....."As opposed to the formalist universe of modernism, the work of the Poiriers, Long, Merz, Anselmo, Casás, or Hamilton Finlay could be said to participate in Schelling´s pantheistic nature; but more than a separation of both spheres of reference, nature and culture-in short, a confluence of Condillac and Schelling-a synthesis of the two persists in the work of all the artists involved in the Isla de Esculturas to compose a landscape that would re-create the differences as vast collage and a unique poem of accumulated syncronicities, whose ideal image, as stated earlier, would be T.S. Eliot´s The Waste Land, a poetic work that Octavio Paz continued to consider, even into the 1990s, profoundly contemporary..

     As in The Waste Land, which reunifies past and present by means of metaphors and symbols drawn-as Eliot discloses in his own commentaries-from Jessie L. Weston´s book From Ritual to Romance, a work on the ritual origins and Legends of the Holy Grail, as well from the mythological anthropology of The Golden Bough, the sculptures in the space encircled by the Lérez river comprise a single whole, a plurality of cultural allusions, languages, and concepts, classical references, and more contemporary experiences that entail the re-creation of a cosmos, a new order of nature in the face of chaos, image of a re-organised world-the imago mundi of the ancients-harmonised by an occupation that re-creates it under various forms and norms. This is a characteristic image of consecration, synchronising the different actions in situ to form a complex puzzle, the discovery of which unveils visual relationships eith such constants as the water, the vegetation, the fauna, sky, the falling and rising of the tides, and the passing of the seasons (basic in Anne and Patrick Poirier´s work of plants Small Paradise). And son, we substantiate Selden Rodman´s analysis of the Isla de Esculturas: one can only begin to understand The Waste Land by regarding the simultaneity of its images as a self-enclosed whole.  .

                                                                       X. Antón Castro.