ICARUS VIII Sculpture

Rajá Simon was born in the capital of São Paulo, Brazil in 1947. Rajá currently lives and works in Iguape, a coastal city in the south of the state of São Paulo, where he transferred his studio. Simon begins his artistic journey as a painter, and has always been interested in experimentation, adding different elements to the canvas, in such a way that his paintings began to incorporate reliefs, and sculpture was a natural consequence of the evolution of this process. The artist works with various materials: wood, plastic, ceramics, among others, but metal is his favorite choice. Mainly by bonding the shapes created with oxy-acetylene soldering and electric soldering. He fell in love with the heat of fire! Your sources of inspiration are diverse; be they zoomorphic, anthropomorphic, or pure abstraction, but always exploring synthesis, seeking the essence of the dynamics of movement in space. His work process starts with an idea, sometimes he chooses a theme as a mere pretext to develop the form. He make some sketches to make the idea concrete; sometimes he makes small models to analyze the shape from its various points of view. Everything defined, starts by cutting the metal blades with appropriate machines; he shapes each part of the sheet with hammers to give them shape, and finally joins them together with welding. It cleans up the residues of the work, but keeping the marks left over from the fulguration of the weld and the sometimes violent blows of the hammer (the steel plate is very hard). The connecting lines between elements, the roughness, are perpetuated as scars from the creation process. Like an ancestral blacksmith, the artist shapes the swift movement of his sculptures with steel and fire. Ícaro is the character that Rajá has been building, work after work, for a long time. Oblivious to the cruelty of the legend, his Icarus flies, a light bird, or travels fast, scimitar tearing through the air. Another, falls vertiginous through infinite space; some, even dies! . . . The figure of an Icarus, no longer ethereal, now solidified, clearly comes close to a legend generated for the future. The young man transforms into the intergalactic warrior, a sidereal cruiser annihilated by a fatal sunbeam and, invariably projected into the sea. But it soon reappears in the next sculpture, like a nerve bursting in an abrupt silence, fragment of an image stoped in time. The objective exist. It doesn't matter to reach him.