Filip Custic en Conversación con César Manrique

About

In line with César Manrique’s polymath spirit, Filip Custic has created a specially-commissioned installation by Fundación César Manrique that consists on a totalizing aesthetic experience that combines sculpture, video and sound art, AR and 3D animation. At the core of his intervention lies (hyperrealistic ego) + (wind toy) =, a kinetic hyperrealistic sculpture created in Custic’s own image and likeness. Surrounded by glass plates that generate different light and optic effects, this hyperreal avatar contains a motor that gives movement to the whole structure, toying between the stagnancy of this self-automated machine and the animation of its kinetic nature.

By introducing a fluid and mobile artwork in our virtual reality, Custic’s piece offers viewers a unique time-space experience to be lived. In fact, the work itself constitutes Custic’s artistic response to the giant mobiles ‘Juguetes del viento’ (series Toy Winds) created by Manrique by the end of his career. But whereas the raison d’être of Manrique’s mobiles was the wind itself –as both the natural motor of his monumental sculptures and the wind crops of Lanzarote– in Custic’s piece its machine-generated movement comes to say that our potential to learn and apprehend reality, like human learning, comes ultimately from our inner selves.

Be it through painting, sculpture, architecture or sound art or animation, the truth is that both artists are concerned with a strong sense of aesthetic experimentation and with a constant re-evaluation of the contemporary potential of the past. Just like there is a correspondence between the human body and our natural environment, technology, as a human product and tool, ought to maintain a sustainable relationship with the organic, unifying thus the best of humanity and nature. In this sense, whereas Manrique focussed on the reinterpretation of nature and the isle of Lanzarote’s traditions, Custic aims to integrate art and technology in order to save the gap between humankind and nature herself.

In a present where the existence of climate change is still questioned, recovering the work and figure of Manrique, who tried to integrate human creations into the environment, is more pressing than ever. By emphasising the importance of new technologies in the configuration of our contemporary cultural codes, Custic takes over the innovative and pioneering character of Manrique, actualising the maxim that art is an organic process able to transform both the environment and ourselves in a positive way.