Airy and light in solid cast iron (Eskilstuna-Kuriren April 12)

Article published in the newspaper Eskilstuna-Kuriren the 12 April for my show, transcript:

Airy and light in solid cast iron


The inspiration for his beautiful and playful sculptures Marco Cueva finds in all from animated television series for children to baroque.
Today opens his exhibition at the Art Gallery in Hälleforsnäs.

Rosewood, sandalwood and alabaster are some of the materials that Marco Cueva uses for his sculptures.
Lined up on podiums, they give a classic impression in which the forms are coherent and unadorningly simplified.
Some will incite you to feel it with their very velvety surface to the touch.

– I have added color as a continuation of the process, says Marco Cueva – the physically heavy iron appears to lighten and the expression changes when different colors are added.

And certainly, when an intense pink little thing stands and calls for attention in the gallery’s rear I become enticed to go there. At first, I wonder if it’s plastic, but on closer inspection it is a cast iron sculpture that, despite its simplified processing retains the essential.
The thoughts are led to both a children’s tale Babar and Ganesh from the Indian pantheon.

Another work “Flor de fango”, the title comes from an Argentine tango roughly translates “flower growing in mire” is a brittle or perhaps fleeting small sculpture that makes me think of a pink flamingo on thin legs swaying in a wetland.

Many times there is a complex competitive challenge in the sculptures; the vision of something airy and light, expressed through a heavy and solid material.
In another series of works; iron masks made ​​to function as outdoor fountains where water will spring out of their mouths, inspired by famous historical faces. There’s Medusa from the Greek mythology and a characteristic Japanese temple guard with his angry expression.

Cueva lives and works in Stockholm but was born from Honduras. He has, since he finished the studies at the Royal College of Art in 1997, showed around the world, including in New York, Madrid and Nicaragua. On his record there are also several public art commissions.

Next in line after the Art Gallery in Hälleforsnäs is an exhibition in Paris and later on, the sculptures will be displayed in a museum in Honduras.

Emma Jönsson

Eskilstuna-Kuriren 12 april 2014

Art criticism in the World of Art

Review published in the  art criticism section in the blog of Magdalena Dziurlikowska:

Marco Cueva, Mytologier, Gallery Charlotte Lund, 1 sep – 1 oct, 2011
Myths are sacred stories that explain the world and connect people. It is also said that stories are the stuff we are woven of. When Cueva collects twenty or so of his works under the name Mythologies, he alludes to the big questions and the deep mysteries . Who we are, where we come from and where are we heading? Cueva hands us a bunch of fantastic things on the way, more entities and amulets than sculptures, and wants us to feel them. The caress makes a trip along the undulating alabaster, wood, marble and bronze, but can also get a sting on a nail. In this way one becomes familiar with the clouds, volcanoes, the Minotaur and the genie in the lamp. Usually it is not an object but a state of mind being imaged. A feeling that is produced in the viewer with a starting point in the multilayered , semiabstract sculptures. Cuevas ways to use classic materials and give them soft shapes provide security, however against this calm contradictions are broken between material and subject. Smoked loops of stone and a frizzy hair of nail heads inject  humor and surrealism into the story . The myth , the eternal story of our wonder over all that is there , and the strange , glorious act of being.