Daniel Alegre, Luz for Sculpture

Santander,

In its usual line of research and exhibition of work of Cantabrian artists, parallel to its conservation work of a collection formed by about 6,000 pieces, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Santander and Cantabria. But he welcomes, until next June, a set of twenty -one sculptures made by Daniel Alegre, whose death is fulfilled this 2025 76 years. Born in Escalante in 1897, he formed in Barcelona and Paris; If in Catalonia it was attracted to Noucentisme and the art of historical inspiration, in the French capital he was part of the SOCIETE DES ARTISTES INDEPENDANTS (The Hall of Independents) and was influenced by Rodin, who was a disciple. Contemporaries and colleagues were also for Alegre Mariano Benlliure, Victorio Macho and José Villalobos.

After the beginning of World War I he returned to Santander, where he continued his career under those imprints. The most reviews that journey, in the reopening space 0, from the studies of a curatorial team composed of Salvador Carreter those dedicated to Juan Uslé and José Gallego.

Daniel Alegre. A Cuban. Photography: Belén Pereda

Given its vital chronology, it inevitably in the work of this artist still has a crucial weight the nineteenth -century sculpture, so wide and rich that delimiting currents and individual traits in it is not easy; Maybe either desirable. It is a time, likewise, in which references to the past are intersecting: to the realism of the bronze portraits of Etruscans and Romans, the extreme Hellenistic passions, to baroque fleshyness, the sentimental explosions of romanticism or the neoclassical smooth skins.

This exhibition wanted to link the pieces of Alegre with those made by the first authors of the symbolism that, at the end of the 19th century, wanted to distance themselves from both the then dominant detailed realism and of the impressionist search for objectivity in the capture of the transitory, claiming, in front of one and the other isism, the supernatural character inherent in the individual beyond the visible or mechanical details of their body. He developed or the machines with which he began to operate, in a Europe in the process of industrialization. For the symbolists, both the attention to the detail and the affectation could serve the artist to express his technical virtuosity, but they moved him away from the representation of human essences.

Very clearly, the sculptures of Alegre, in which he tried to combine physicality and spirituality, the durable material and the perhaps brief expression, also drink, as José Cobo points out, of the classicism of Mailol or Josep Clarà, developed in parallel with respect to the first avant -garde; With them, and obviously with the Renaissance sculptors close to the Neoplatonism, he had in common the belief that the image is inside the marble before the sculptor releases it, hence his figures seem to throb at times, in struggle with the stone. However, the light of the Alegre marble does not come only from that conception, but also from the observation of the same material in itself and its geological features and times: it is interior and physical at the same time; It is related to the purity of the white Pi de Carrara and the transcendent expression of the models, expressed with the purpose of authenticity.

The organic and the inorganic coexist in the pieces of Escalante, also the solemnity and a soft dynamism; They provide expressiveness without ever falling into the communicative excess. He was one of those authors who put the subject at the service of life.