Lorenzo Domínguez (Santiago de Chile 1901-Mendoza, Argentina 1963) was a prolific Latin American sculptor whose art is a deliberate and personal synthesis of pre-Columbian and Rapa Nui (Easter Island) aesthetics with a European artistic formation.
At forty, he moved to Argentina, where he lived for almost twenty years in the cities of Mendoza and Tucumán, teaching at the university and creating sculptures, embossed metal plates and drawings.
[4] The encounter with Easter Island and with an aesthetics signed by both monumentality and line, offers Domínguez the opportunity for a new synthesis of European, Latin American pre-Columbian and Rapa Nui artistic elements.
He thought that "there is no quality in an art that occurs without a struggle", and that materials like clay and plaster are "too soft and obedient",[6] while "stone resists, but at the same time cooperates...
Some of these sculptures were public monuments to Santiago Ramón y Cajal,[8] to Johann Sebastian Bach,[9] to Louis Pasteur, to Dr. Luis Calvo Mackenna, to Leandro N. Alem, to José de San Martín and Bernardo O'Higgins,[10] to Dr. Miguel Lillo and to Plato.
Many of Lorenzo Domínguez's sculptures are portraits, others belong to his "Planetarium series" ("Portrait of the Moon", "The Planet Venus", "The Planet Saturn", "The Milky Way", "Berenice" and "The Morning Star"[11]), some are nudes or torsos, some have existential or metaphysical subjects ("Death", "Hope", "Time Hieroglyph"), some have a political subject ("The Unknown Political Prisoner", "Barcelona", "Peace"), some have religious subjects ("Christ", "The Virgin of Hope", "Saint Olalla"), some are of Latin American inspiration ("Llaima-Llaima", "María Coya", "La Cuyanita"), and some are of Easter Island inspiration ("Father Sebastian Englert from Easter Island" and "Young Girl from Easter Island").
He befriended other plastic artists like the painters Hernán Gazmuri, Abelardo Bustamante, Inés Puyó and María Tupper, as well as painters from the Montparnasse Group (Camilo Mori, Pablo Burchard, Augusto Eguiluz and Anita Cortés); sculptors like Samuel Román Rojas, Totila Albert and Laura Rodig; poets like Pablo Neruda,[20] winner of the 1971 Nobel Prize for Literature, Vicente Huidobro, the vanguardist author responsible for "creacionismo", and Nicanor Parra; writers like the novelists Marta Brunet,[21] Augusto d'Halmar, Manuel Rojas and Mariano Latorre; musicians like Claudio Arrau, Acario Cotapos, Víctor Tevah and Rosita Renard; and scientists like professor Alejandro Lipschutz.
The first, a bronze sculpture, was dedicated "To Jaime Pinto Riesco", a young medicine student killed by the police on July 24, 1931, during a demonstration against Carlos Ibáñez's dictatorship (1927–1931); the second one, a large stone head "To Johann Sebastian Bach", is placed at the Parque Forestal, in Santiago; the third one is a stone monument placed at the Department of Dentistry at the Universidad de Chile, dedicated "To Dr. Germán Valenzuela Basterrica", the founder of Chile's Dental School.
During his time in Mendoza (1941–1949; 1956–1959; 1961–1963), Lorenzo Domínguez re-encountered Victor Delhez, whom he had met in Santiago de Chile, and befriended other artists: painters like Francisco Bernareggi, Ramón Gómez Cornet, Roberto Azzoni, Rosalía Flichman, Roberto Cascarini, Fidel de Lucia, José Manuel Gil, Enrique Sobisch and Rosa Arturo; the draughtsmen Fivaller Subirats and Mario Marziali; the humorist and cartoonist Joaquín Lavado or "Quino"; engravers like Sergio Hocevar (or Sergio Sergi) and Heriberto Hualpa; poets and writers, like Reinaldo Bianchini, Alberto Cirigliano, Alberto Dáneo, Daniel Devoto, Jorge Enrique Ramponi, Guillermo Kaúl, Américo Calí, Ricardo Tudela, Antonio Di Benedetto, Julio Cortázar,[25] Abelardo Vázquez, Juan Villaverde, Iverna Codina, Angélica Mendoza, Fernando Lorenzo, Víctor Hugo Cúneo, Armando Tejada Gómez, Rodolfo Braceli and Hugo Acevedo; the historian Claudio Sánchez Albornoz; the writer and philosophy professor Diego F. Pró, who would later become his biographer; Ernesto and Joan Coromines, who were respectively mathematician and philologist; Edmundo Correas, first rector of the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo; professors of literature like Adolfo Ruiz Díaz, Alfredo Roggiano, Emilia Puceiro and Delia Villalobos; other professors like Matilde Zuloaga, Enrique Zuleta Álvarez, Lorenzo Mascialino and Manlio Lugaresi; the mathematician Manuel Balanzat; the medical doctors Fernando Mas Robles, Francisco Correas, Francisco Amengual, Mario Burgos and Rodolfo Muratorio Posse; several musicians, like the pianist Antonio De Raco, the composer Isidro Maiztegui, the composer and singer of folk songs Jaime Dávalos, the organist and composer Julio Perceval, Juan Salomone, Amicarelli, Julio Malaval, the pianist Estela López Lubary and the singers Mary Lan and Mercedes Sosa; the actress and theater director Galina Tolmacheva and the actress Niní Gambier; the folklorist and narrator Juan Draghi Lucero; the journalist Miguel Gómez Echea; the editor Gildo D'Accurzio; the photographer Antonio D'Elia; the lawyer Juan Carlos Silva; and the architects Daniel Ramos Correas, Samuel Sánchez de Bustamante, and Arturo and Manolo Civit.
Among his students, four young artists worked with him for an extended period: Beatriz Capra, Mariano Pagés, José Carrieri and Carlos de la Mota.
Other students included: Luis Quesada, Carlos Alonso, Orlando Pardo, Leonor Rigau, Miguel Ángel Sugo, Marcelo Santángelo, Irene Pepa, Elio Mirrado, Alberto Moscatelli and José Bermúdez.
There, his friends were sculptors like Líbero Badii, Antonio Sibellino, Alfredo Bigatti, José Fioravanti, Horacio Juárez, Noemí Gerstein and Lea Lublin; painters like Emilio Pettoruti, Héctor Basaldúa, Benito Quinquela Martín, Lucio Fontana, Raquel Forner, Luis Seoane, Alfredo Guido, Ernesto Farina and Mariette Lydis; ceramists like Fernando Arranz and Tove Johansen; art critics like Jorge Romero Brest, Córdova Iturburu, Julio Payró, Roger Plá, José Luis Pagano, Lorenzo Varela, Miguel de los Santos and Romualdo Brughetti; photographers like Horacio Coppola, Grete Stern and Anatole Saderman; poets and writers like the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti and his wife, the novelist María Teresa León, the Guatemalan novelist Miguel Ángel Asturias, Nobel Prize in literature in 1967, the vanguardist authors Oliverio Girondo and Eduardo González Lanuza, and other writers and poets like Manuel Mujica Láinez, Mario Binetti and Victoria Ocampo; actors and theater people like Margarita Xirgu, Delia Garcés, Pedro López Lagar or the scenographer Gori Muñoz; the editor Gonzalo Losada; and art collectors like Víctor Bossart and Federico Vogelius.
Two monuments were dedicated "To Leandro N. Alem", a famous Argentine politician of democratic and anti-authoritarian ideas that in 1891 founded what is considered Argentina's oldest political party, the Radical Civic Union.
Located at the campus of the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, this bronze figure reaches 2.40 m. both in arm span and in height and is a posthumous cast from the original 1947 plaster.
During his first period in Mendoza, Lorenzo Domínguez completed several new portraits in stone: two portraits of his wife, "Clara" and "Clara Federica"; "Francisco Bernareggi"; "Beatriz Capra"; "Ramón Gómez Cornet", placed at the Museo Provincial de Bellas Artes in Santiago del Estero, Argentina; "Sergio Sergi", in black granite and one of the artist's masterpieces; "Marjorie", in Carrara marble; "Federica", a first portrait of his daughter; "La Pilo", Ramón Gómez Cornet's daughter; "Zezette Dáneo", placed at the Art Department of the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo; "Paco Correas", Dr. Francisco Correas' son; "The Poet Ramponi"; "Hipólito Digiovanni", his father in-law; and "Francisco Amengual" and his wife "Dorita Zabalza de Amengual".
At the time, the city of Tucumán had become an artistic center, hosting painters like Lino Enea Spilimbergo, Ramón Gómez Cornet, Luis Lobo de la Vega, Timoteo Navarro, José Nieto Palacios, Francisco Ramoneda and Medardo Pantoja; engravers like Pompeyo Audivert and Víctor Rebuffo; draughtsmen like Lajos Szalay and Eugenio Hirsch; and a group of jewelers and metal workers headed by Pedro Zurro de la Fuente.
Lorenzo Domínguez's circle of colleagues and friends included the writers Enrique Anderson Imbert and Pablo Rojas Paz; the architects Eduardo Sacriste, Hilario Zalba, Jorge Vivanco, Horacio Caminos, Eithel Federico Traine, Federico Lerena and Enrico Tedeschi; the biology and medicine researchers Cecilio Romagna, Giuseppe Cei and Juan Carlos Fasciolo; the psychiatrist Juan Dalma; the priest Petit de Murat; the orchestra director Carlos Félix Cillario and, whenever he had a concert, the harpist Nicanor Zabaleta.
Occasionally, during his Tucumán period, Domínguez traveled to Resistencia, Chaco, where he met Aldo and Efraín Boglietti and Hilda Torres Varela who, along with other intellectuals, had organized a cultural center and a residence for artists, the "Fogón de los Arrieros".
"The Argentine Antarctic" is a symbolic work in plaster that portrays a powerful female figure wearing boots and heavy leather clothes, with a sea lion by her side.
Lorenzo Domínguez intended to use the drawings of the "Via Crucis of Don Quixote" to illustrate a special edition of Cervantes' novel, a project that he never abandoned, not even during his stay in Easter Island.
Lorenzo Domínguez completed two important sculptures between 1956 and 1959: a monument dedicated to "Plato", placed at the Department of Philosophy and Letters of the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, and a "Torso" in black granite.
The artist continued with the religious themes: "Santa Barbara", "Christ and Saint John", "Veronica", "Virgin", "The Unrepentant Thief" "Sanctity", "The Visit", and one of his masterpieces, "Jude's Kiss".
This Chilean Island, also called Rapa Nui, is one of the most isolated places on earth, since it is in the Southeastern Pacific Ocean, 2000 miles from continental Chile and Tahiti which are the nearest population centers.
The pilot was Roberto Parragué, a Chilean Capitán de Bandada, who was performing his third adventurous flight between Valparaíso and Easter Island in an old Flying boat, the Manutara II.
A few days afterwards he returned to Mendoza, to his wife, his two sons and daughter and his mother, as well as to his workshop in Montevideo Street, the old building where he taught his classes to the art students of the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo.
In 1961 the artist finished an embossed copper plate, "Breakfast is Ready", on the subject of painful servitude: mother and child are carrying a tray, lacerated by the nails and crown of thorns typical of Christian crucifixion.
During this period Lorenzo Domínguez performed drawings that can also be considered masterpieces and show the influence of the aesthetic experience he had just lived in Easter Island.
Along three hundred pages Domínguez registers his aesthetic reflections and his personal emotions upon contemplating the Island's moais and petroglyphs; he speaks about the urgent need to preserve this artistic patrimony; he tells his wife about his own creative process, and gives details about what he is sculpting and drawing and about the photographs that he is taking.
But the artist also writes about his everyday life in the Island, about the people he meets, about what he eats or reads, about his travels on horse back accompanied by his guide, Santiago Pakarati, and about his personal feelings of longing and love for his wife and family.
Among them there are articles by Albrecht Goldschmidt, Jorge Romero Brest, Córdova Iturburu, Reinaldo Bianchini, Diego F. Pró, Manuel Gonzalo Casas, Romualdo Brughetti, David Lagmanovich, Roger Plá, Miguel Gómez Echea, Darío Carmona, Antonio Romera, Lorenzo Varela, Juan José Mirabelli, Nélida Cuetos and Adolfo Ruíz Díaz.