“Lo antropomórfico” [“The Anthropomorphic”] brings together a broad selection of sculptures – the least narrative ones – in which Francisco Leiro (Cambados, Pontevedra 1957) has endowed animals and things with human features and qualities.

While not a retrospective exhibition, it does include works executed from 1986 until now. For the last few decades, moreover, his exhibitions have provided an overview of his main themes and a showcase for his latest output. Leiro understands each of these occasions as a test, a challenge, in which his first consideration is how to fill the space. Walking through the rooms he visualizes which works to show and even the best way to do so, and from this first idea a sketch emerges of his proposal which he later discusses, but whose end result tends not to stray far from the original concept.

Leiro made a name for himself at the end of the 70s with figurative works categorized as surreal-like due to their freedom of form and iconography. However, it was in the 80s that he was afforded widespread recognition which has been growing ever since. In those years of the burgeoning of expressive painting, defined by gesture, matter and a knack for evoking images, he was one of the few sculptors of his generation to stake out his own personal space in exhibitions and debates. While he has been acclaimed by some for exploring local traditions to create his unique voice, his curiosity led him to research the origins of a wide variety of stylistic approaches, beginning with those he had closest at hand, such as the Galician Romanesque and Baroque, yet relating them at all times to contemporary proposals.

Similarly, architecture, design and even civilizations far removed from his own surroundings, are objects of interest, analysed always for three-dimensional matters: the solidity of coastal buildings, a presence which when in ruins is imbued with a magic, symbolic quality; the movement that Simón Rodríguez infuses into his façades and alter-pieces, shifting the heavy elements to the upper parts; the almost intimate way in which Asorey combines the monumental and the familiar, the way he works with scale; the abrupt monumentality of Mexican sculpture; how everyday objects work… Leiro’s attitude is one of conversation, of dialogue with historical and current sculpture, invariably viewed directly; and his analysis, methodical and visceral.

In effect, notwithstanding the local power of some of the themes that provide access to his works, Leiro’s oeuvre, alongside that of Juan Muñoz, Thomas Schütte and Stephan Balkenhol, is an indispensable factor in understanding the outings of the best figurative, European sculpture of the late 20th century.

Among the elements that clearly define and individualize his oeuvre is an underlying kind of oral tradition (visual too, of course) found in many of his compositions. And the refined and popular mythology of sayings and proverbs, of rural-based wisdom: few sculptors possess his ability, or even his ease, to translate into three dimensions the haiku-like paradoxes contained in popular names and stories. And fewer still are able to radicalize their approach by defending its contemporaneity.

In 1991, when he took stock of his works, he put them into three groups: figures, sculptures and things. Aware that many of them could fit into various categories, for him it was a question of defending their intent, the debates they contained. The more narrative sense of the figures, the three-dimensional problems solved by the sculptures and the works that are most like objects.

The ones that are brought together in “Lo antropomórfico” have as their starting point his trips to Mexico, at the time when, in search of new dialogues and incentives, he decided to open a studio, firstly in Madrid and subsequently in New York. In Mexico he was surprised by Aztec sculpture, its broken forms, its harshness and even its cruel nature. He started to produce schematic works, which focussed on painful, confrontational situations: the struggle, in a ham leg vice, of an organic body part and the piece of metal that torments it; the broken body, shattered, by falling on a rock, a specific example being Carroña [Carrion], the germ for later sculptures. O his suite of Pavitas [Turkey chicks], commencing with Guajolote, which has three points of support, a solution that provides dynamism and stability all at once.

In this exhibition, designed for MARCO, Leiro has prepared works that respond, sometimes paradoxically, to the peculiarities of the space, which only goes to prove that he has one of the most highly developed senses of space and planning of all his fellow sculptors.

Miguel Fernández-Cid
Curator of the exhibition