López Lejardi, poetic plastic

Santander,

Luis López Lejardi is a more than familiar name, and for decades, for those who remain attentive to the artistic scene in Cantabria. He was born in Torrelavega in 1957 and is a self-taught author who began drawing very early – managing to sell his first portraits and posters for different events – but who, before long, began to use recycled materials to create his sculptures, a path that, essentially, he would never abandon.

A trip to the Documenta in Kassel and Münster, in 1987, would support that vocation: well versed in the production of Beuys, Warhol or the arte povera of Mario Merz, he would not fail to transform these reused elements into artistic objects, seeing his intuition accommodated at the height of assembly and the new ready-made in the seventies and eighties.

López Lejardi has starred in individual exhibitions at La Vidriera in Camargo, the Zoom, Juan Silió and Siboney galleries or the Inder Espacio in Santander, and is now presenting at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Santander and Cantabria. MORE “Fables of vision. Vertical gazes”, a compendium of his recent works, most of them derived from plastic, curated by Lidia Gil and Fernando Zamanillo.

For a few years now, plastic has been his fetish material, as in successive previous stages were rubber, sheet metal, glass, cardboard or copper: these components, and their industrial treatment, are defining of his creations, almost always forceful and tending towards essentiality, although he combines references to conceptual art, povera, minimal and pop.

Luis López Lejardi. Fables of vision. Vertical looks. More Santander

Speaking of industrial treatment, it has frequently used parts of cars and different transport machines, or traffic signs, finding forms of beauty in the designs that raw materials acquire on assembly lines – and also an opportunity to warn of the effects of pollution, not only now, but three decades ago. His work itself has been an example of constant and sustainable reuse: junkyards, second-hand or methacrylate stores, factories and scrapyards have nourished his ideas and proposals, as have his continuous visits to museums and exhibitions.

Found and poor materials generate his pieces, and from them metaphors linked to hyperconsumption, basic, but effective in terms of their communication to the viewer: his reimagined belongings are not far from those that surround us every day, and López Lejardi seems to remind us that they can be aesthetically appreciated and reworked; become, as his 2023 exhibition at Juan Silió was titled, into vehicular forms. Stop, if not, at your Venus and your Apollo of spoons.

Aside from these very specific readings linked to burning issues today, other more literary ones are possible: there is harmony and symbolism in the colors and shapes of common instruments, a hidden order to unravel, poetic suggestions.