Between 1933 and 1936, after experimenting with the void, Julio Gonzalez returns to full volumes in an important series of heads carved in stone from Monthyon, a village in Seine et Marne where the artist acquires a residence in 1926. The editions in bronze presented here are posthumous. These heads, all carved directly into the stone, oscillate between  figuration and abstraction. Brigitte Léal, curator at the Centre Pompidou, describes a "roughness of the block preserved to enhance the archaic brutality of the facial expression". The features of the faces, none of which have been identified, are anonymous and blurred. These works manifest Gonzalez's growing interest in Gothic sculpture and cathedral statuary. In his manuscript, "Picasso and cathedrals. Sculptor Picasso" (1931-1932), Julio Gonzalez exalts the beauty and the geometry of their statue-columns and, without renouncing the sculpture of the void, defends his personal approach to stone sculpture: "In order to provide maximum power and beauty to one's work, statuary must retain a certain mass, and account for its external contour. It is therefore in the center of this mass that one must direct all of one's efforts, imagination and science (...) In stone sculpture, holes must not exist."

Techniques illustrées :

Jewellery / Goldsmithing

Drawings

Paintings

Sculptures