Yvonne
Domenges Sculpture
I
believe that a union exists between this art critic and Yvonne Domenge,
and that is the incessant search of clarifying the creating thought
together with a compromise as a visual producer.
Yvonne, is completely devoted to her compromise as a sculptor, to the
creation of her seeds, mandalas and bowls; Recurrent themes, in her
last pieces in which she has dedicated a long time to unify the concept
and the material or materials that made it real in a sculptural work.
In her seeds, she magically transforms, builds and makes us see a
bizarre and new reality, in line with a millennial reflex, as Jean
Rudel mentions it talking about sculptors. The artist searches in her
seeds the light magic of lines and curves, all of them wrapping,
protecting and always on the brink of germinating, some of them
sculpted on wood, rescuing the material veins and emphasizing its
origin characteristics as well as Domenge's conceptual and creative one
with ink. In contrast, in the sculptures made with wood, Yvonne has
shown along her professional development, a handiness doing the finish
with great refinement. Other seeds are made of metal with a dark
pigment that contrasts with the ones made of a soap paste, obtaining an
ephemeral fragility produced by the material's molecular structure,
getting with it transparencies unified with the seed concept, meaning,
ethereal, fragile, letting the light pass through them and letting them
emerge to life.
Nature gives us shapes and Domenge makes them her own and transforms
them. Her seeds, of minuscule origin, get dimensions of surrounding
universes as containers or refuges in which we can either recreate an
interior space or a key to open a new hidden desire.
In the bowls, the sculpture transports us to unreal, silent, intimates
and impassable universes. These great containers of a dense liquid with
obsidian reflexing capacities and their black and golden walls, are
capable of becoming full universes where the spectator plays with his
own cosmic privacy.
To talk about these bowls, a thought of the sculptor Federico Silva
came to my mind: “The sculpture surges toward the outside, it's clear,
obscure, light and shade, and its special contact is related with the
earth and spectator magnetic field and movement.” In Yvonne's bowls,
the spectator gets the opportunity of creating his own movements, not
only in traversing the piece but also by making the dense liquid
vibrate, braking its calm and producing with it a magnetic union
between the author and her piece.
It's known that several mandalas shapes exist and that they're used to
different purposes, the ones created by Yvonne in a sculptural format
have two main intentions: The first one, is to show the artist's
encounter with her own interior process and development through her
tridimensional creations; the second one is, through this experience
and through the author's search, let the spectator have a universe
encounter, so we can get in touch with our interior force. The circles,
mats and the geometrical and balanced repetition is permanent. In the
reddish wood, a cross, with an infinite and constant movement, surges
from the interior uniting it with the rhythmic and superposed surface.
In other piece of her own, an endless metal ribbon invites us to travel
and reason through the impossible and without reason geometry.
Without any pretension, Yvonne gives movement to the inanimate
materials, sustained by lines that originate tridimensional spaces.
Domenge gives traditional forms a new interpretation with a new
vitality of her own personality and search for finding herself and
finding an approach with the surrounding, men and women of her times.
Eduardo A.Chvez Silva
Art Critic
Winter 2002
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Yvonne Domenge or the vicissitudes of the
creation
Bio
A native of Mexico City, Yvonne Domenge was born and raised in a
sophisticated family surrounding where listening to live classical
music was part of her everyday life. Her father being a lawyer, played
several musical instruments, without doing it professionally.
At home, philosophical discussions about knowledge theory and classical
Greeks where also frequent. This caused in her a restless and
clarifying personality. That's why, in a parallel way with her devotion
to plastic art, she studied psychology (human development), but she
decided to choose art as her vital interest.
Nevertheless, this humanist formation has been of great utility in her
activities in the Buenos Aires area in Mexico City, where several
members of this community work, under her direction, making sculptures
with junkyard scrap.
She has what the Centenary Generation calls “Eros didactico”. has
taught artistic appreciation as well as art therapy in sculpture and
drawing. She has also coordinated many forums in Mexico and abroad. One
of them called “Arte y Ciencia” (Art and Science), in Canada with
artists of all around the world.
On the other hand, with proverbial generosity, for many years Yvonne
has work to discover, rescue and guide young sculptors in the creation
of their work, as part of the FONCA (Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y
Las Artes) program.
The fulfillment of her plastic vocation, accepted with an inflexible
discipline, has been fruitful specially in a continuous dynamism of
volumes and empty spaces, protuberances and hollows, which have found
their subtle eroticism by reading about tantra philosophy, that shows
the identity of the cosmic and sexual energy. This conviction
intersperse with all her work, full of restless imagination, inhabited
by the contrary tension and the creation of optical movements,
equilibrium and balance exercises, in which opposites, light and
shadow, movement and stillness, absence and presence, solidity and
fragility, unify themselves in a harmonious coexistence. Her prolific
and divers work of shinning and sober chromaticism has allowed her to
be honored with awards and distinctions in Mexico and abroad.
Since she was six years old, Yvonne studied with her aunt Elne Domenge
(Kitzia Hoffman), who was also a sculptor and a stained-glass artist,
and at the beginnings she also studied, painting with Benjamn Molina.
She entered the Escuela de Artesanas No.5 del INBA (INBA's School of
Handcrafts No. 5), where she assimilated, among other things, the
characteristic colour of our popular expressions, then transcribed to
her sculptural work: The reddish tone of the pill bug, the indigo blue,
the saffron yellow, the shinning gold leaf, the reflection of the
silver leaf, etc.
She also studied in Montreal and Washington D.C., as well as in Alberto
Prez Soria's sculpture workshop, where she learned, among other
things, how to manage small and large scale pieces.
She worked in a foundry workshop where she took control of the secrets
of the process by which means the bronze takes the place of the lost
wax. She also learned how to obtain the diverse patinas of this
sculptural material. Actually, besides the daily practice, she
continues making technical and scientific research in her own workshop,
and in the Nuclear Investigations Institute.
Yvonnes devotion to her profession is exemplary. The origin of her
creativity's energy comes from trying to ”Recreate, in three dimensions
the shapes that only exist in my interior; To give form to my
questioning has been my leitmotif”.
The musical term that ends the quotation hits the target, it hits upon
more than one sense. For example, her vast production of spheres could
easily have a score's title: “Theme and variations”. It's not in vain
that the great writer from Campeche, Juan de la Cabada, is of the
opinion that “The work of the Mexican sculptor Yvonne Domenge is like a
dance of shapes with their lineal plasticity and music”.
Her extraordinary manual capacity is mainly evident in the polished
finishes of her pieces. She has sculpted in wood, stone, bronze, carbon
and stainless steel, silver, ice, resins, wax, soap, porcelain, as well
as in other diverse materials.
She's been a member of the generation that assumed the technological
changes of our times. Her tools have been from the chisel and the
hammer, the pencil and the paper, till the pneumatic tools, the
computers and the electronic microscopes.
From the spheric idea of things
A sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere.
Pascal
After many transitory figurative incursions, that the artist remits to
“Identity researches”, mainly streamlined representations of the
feminine body, took her to the geometrical abstraction, sustaining her
researches in the sphere, by which she was obsessed. Along her artistic
development, in many of her creations, Yvonne has treated her favorite
model with an enormous versatility, where this shape manifests itself,
opened or closed, organically or geometrically.
The fixation with the sphere, or better said, this passion in both
senses of the meaning: Indestructible vocation, dedication and
suffering, agony comes form Yvonne's childhood, when she used to listen
in her family gathering talks about Leibniz monads, those indivisible
beings, energy units that compose the universe according to the German
philosopher, who defined:
"The Monad . . . is nothing but a simple substance, which enters into
compounds. By 'simple' is meant 'without parts.'" "where there are no
parts, there can be neither extension nor shape nor divisibility(...)”.
“ Can also be judged that this unique, supreme, universal and necessary
substance, must be incapable of admitting limits, and where there are
no limits, that means, God, perfection is absolutely infinite (...),
Therefore, it's only the primitive unit or simple primeval substance
and all the monads created or come from it”.
With regard to this divine production, the monad, which according to
Leibniz quotes that it does not have extension nor figure, since her
most young childhood, a spherical shape, came to our sculptor's mind,
because of its unquestionable perfection: “A challenge that kept me
captivated for more than twenty years, time it took me to talk with it.
Its perfection and the fact of being the point of origin and departure,
forced me to respect it, to play with it, to cry for it and to enjoy
it. I discovered the sphere since its monolithic phase until I could
break it up so it could show me its interior”.
Why did destiny want that Yvonne Domenge got obsessed by this
geometrical figure, to the point where she dedicated her talent and
life to work out its secrets?
As the answer of this question, we have the countless productions of
the artist, who actually works, in her lifes plenitude, in the
magistral domination of her expressive resources.
To our delight and enjoyment, the sliding shinning of her pieces
surface, in the formal perfection of her sculpture, the greatness of
her tridimensional and ambitious proposal will persevere.
In that and in the inherent monumentality of her pieces, no matter the
scale, we found a literary contact, a poetic parallelism with a text of
the extraordinary poet , Guadalupe Amor, that's inevitable to quote:
Of my spherical idea of the things,
they divide to my restlessness and my evils,
then geometrically, I think equal
great and the small thing, because being,
they are of equal importance; that existing,
their sizes do not have proportions,
then they are not moderate by his dimensions
and they only count, because are total,
although spherically unequal.
(From “I am my own House”)
Although dedicated to different artistic disciplines -Poetry and
Sculpture- the coincidence in the two authors by this geometrical and
definitive election is remarkable.
If we remember that in poetry -poesis-, in Greek, means creation, both
of them are poets or creators.
Yvonne is the protagonist of an other poem, written by the architect
Agustn Hernndez, with whom she shares a common admiration and
interest of the origins, symbolisms, myths and rituals, and who taught
her that “The order creates liberty”. Yvonne Domenge has collaborated
in the creation of sculptures for specific spaces of some of this
architect's buildings. Agustn Hernndez poetesses the moment when:
Before a spectacle
Of geometrical shapes
A girl is attracted by a circle.
Thematic
From the vast sculptural representation of the Monads, more researches
and encounters, investigations and achievements have been continued
along Yvonne Domenge's artistic career. We will quote several examples,
in the chronological sequence as they emerged during her untiring work,
of increasing growth, in the intelligence whose some of the series
quoted afterwards came to her mind in a coincident manner, as well as
from her conception, the sculptor could also add and/or combine the
plastic findings in the future creations.
Because of an introspective turn, a need rose in her, a need of
understanding and celebrating the creative capacity of the hand, the
homo faber's instruments maker tool, and by means of the one that the
homo ludens has fun. A need that has been satisfied in her series
“Manos” (Hands – Mudra in Hindu-) in which Yvonne Domenge shows her
characteristic versatility.
The eye is drawn to a Yoke, a hand-carved mahogany wood, with a
pre-Hispanic antecedent, part of the outfit of the “Juego de Pelota”
players, a reflection of the continuous astral fight in which the
ancient Mexicans thought they could find the cosmos, this Yoke looks
like two arms putting their hands together, she confesses that when she
dies, she wants to be buried with it protecting her waist, among other
hands made with diverse materials and artistic tendencies, where again,
her obsession bay the sphere arises.
Without abandoning the circular shape, and continuing in the cosmic
flowing of her work, during the best times, amazement connection,
propitious bridge between the macro-cosmos and the micro-cosmos, the
series “Soles” (Suns) gives us the opportunity to contemplate the
celestial deity, in sculptoric representations that emphasizes their
magnificence, as in El Sol Invictus, hand-carved wood, 2.10 m by 1.80
m, pill bug inked, a hollow that displays waving rays; and, Sol
Primigenio, with a central hollow, whose emanations culminate in a
square perimeter; there is another, with the same title of Sol de
Chalak (Chalak's Sun) in wood, 1.50 m height, saffron inked, with large
helicoidal segments and great dynamism.
By the way, the helix and the centrifuge movement of its conformation
have been a factor of many of her creations, sculpted in just a block
or divided in modules that connect their edges together , as in Viento
de Arenas (Wind of Sands), bronze, Clythia (flower that always looks
towards the sun), Dolivier, in carbon steel; Karlain II, quary stone,
representing Mexico in the Hall de Beaux Arts in The Louvre Museum,
among other pieces of small and monumental format and they can be in
interior as well as in urban spaces.
Related with the anterior in the thematic inclusion of the Sun, in her
inclination for philosophical themes, in this case the passing of the
time, took her to measure it, humanize it, by the celestial movement of
he sun, reconciling herself with the mystery that encloses, by the
creation of “Relojes Solares” (Sundials), that add, to their superb
beauty and impeccable workmanship, chronometric precision: the
verisimilitude of their temporal computation. One of them, monumental,
with a circumference of 4 meters, made of carbon steel, can be found at
Universum, in UNAM's University City. The piece upholds the art-science
relationship, that is the museum's objective, by putting science within
reach of everyone in an entertaining form.
Then, having gone from the monolithic form to the intermittent aperture
of the sphere, she uncovers it completely, open and divided, by making
a tridimensional representation of antroopmorphic origin: the hollow of
the hand, primeval vessel that in ancient times held the vital drink,
water, that along with Nefeles, the clouds, also watery vessels, of
ethereal nature, begat the Hollows series, concave receptacles of water
holes or sand particles, that show another era in her creative
development.
She continued to enthusiastically share her interest in the precise and
exquisite beauty of molecular structures, that observed through the
microscope with patience and wonder, had been transplanted to
tridimensional creations in a variety of materials and sizes, but not
as a mere copy, but with their creator's imprimatur, because, as Roland
Barthes says: “the work of art is what man steals from chance”.
The geometric multiplicity in these creations is notable, especially in
Stellar Dimensions. Also of note, Homage to the miges, in tzalam wood,
Dimension of Geodi Nectuni, indigo-dyed wood; Kosmos I, five spheres,
ranging from 80 cm. to 2 meters in diameter, made in wood, stainless
steel, carbon steel and bronze, Microcosmos, bronze, and Interior Sun,
in wood, among others.
In spite of its scientific origin, or precisely because of it, the
Mbius strip and the DNA helix converge in the tridimensional
interpretation of Yvonne's Mandalas. Spiritual sculptures in which
endless strips, developing in labyrinthine evolutions, lead to the path
of meditation, thus increasing the amplitude and depth of
consciousness. In this series with tibetan influences we can note,
among others, the flexible contortions, in spite of the hardness of its
material, of Vital Elan III, in bronze, Karlain I, mandala in Cancn
white stone; Concidentia Oppositorum, in stainless steel, and the
powerful Link-Interior Energy, in bronze, all of them in large format.
“Searching for that which changes our level of consciousness”, the
sculptress has created a series of “Seeds” that express prodigious
sensuality and the mystery of creation of life. In diverse materials,
they propose an identical purpose: to celebrate the perfection of being
the leads us to the fruit as well as the seed. Pieces of an impeccable
softness, as if they were imbued with human warmth, they compel us to
touch them, to stroke them.
Elongated figures, vertical and horizontal, make up this series in
which the undulating and monumental Aurora Borealis stands out, carved
in indigo-stained wood. The pieces expose the volumetric wisdom of
their creator by masterfully solving the encounter of opposing forces,
evident in Opposites, pill bug-dyed wood, Cariatides, in bronze, and in
a curiously spiral Self-Portrait, carved in indigo-stained wood, in
which its creator has expressed “the contradictions that live in me”,
in an abstract language.
The large-scale urban pieces, nearly all of them spheres, that adorn
various metropolitan sites, have consolidated Yvonne's prestige. She
enjoys the interactive relationship they have with the people around
them: “that they touch them, paint them ,climb them, or huddle within.
That way I feel that the pieces already belong to the community where
they reside”
Due to the complexity of the geometric elements it encompasses, and the
grace with which it was solved, Dimension 5 stands out from this set: 4
meters in diameter, of stainless steel. It was created for the 40th
Anniversary of Atomic Energy in Mexico and was placed at the National
Institute for Nuclear Research. The Museum of Modern Art of Mexico City
owns a reproduction of this piece in silver, a commemorative medal in
stainless steel and a 1 meter replica.
Other pieces placed in plazas or parks, that fulfill their role of
monumental aesthetics, are Echo of 5 Instants, steel, 4 meters in
diameter, (Enep Zaragoza); Clythia, carbon steel, 4 meters in diameter
(Monterrey Tech) and Karlain I, bronze, 3 meters in diameter, among
others.
These, in a general, panoramic way, classified and grouped according to
their common characteristics, the series of sculptures that Yvonne
Domenge has created and that spring from the creative work that
occupies her days and nights. She has told me that sometimes she has
woken in the middle of the night, with the plastic solution she has
been searching for clear in her mind, to draw it out on the nearest
piece of paper.
Yes, there is no doubt, inspiration exists: it is possible to listen to
the muse's voice that, according to the Greeks, dictates the poesis. It
is perhaps an unexpected prize, an unthought reward, though deserved,
to diligence, work and the concentration that the creative gift
demands: that capacity to achieve the work's emergence, invisible
before, but alive in the imagination, that makes it place in space,
thanks to the hands of the artist.
Lily Kasner
Spring 2002
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Geometrical Dreams
Mexican sculptor Yvonne Domenge's work gives
form to pieces that melt themselves with spaces, contributing with
their artistic values, but also fulfilling a mission as the
architecture elements of the place where they are placed.
Architechture and art, spaces and objects. Yvonne Domenge sculpts with
materials that go from wood to steel, taking off its coldness and
making it human, warm and bringing it closer becoming objects, objects
that live with the space users every day.
Ricardo Garca Espino
Art Critic
March 2001
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Yvonne Domenges work
Mexican Sculptor Yvonne Domenges work
remind us the Olmec culture. It has a great sense of “Block”, shapes
are enclosed or contained, they dont come out.
These shapes seem to be made from the inside out, as in a conch or
shell cover that unrolls itself that way. Domenge's work is monumental
because her sculpture doesn't have any scale. As small as the pieces
can be, they have monumental dimensions.
Domenge shapes with her dancing hands, those cavities where emptiness
and fulfillment, positive and negative contrast exist without losing
its central unit. Her hands are the ones that make all those surprising
shapes arise. Her fingers learned the material's language, she engages
a dialog in the same language and that brings the material to life so
it can be part of the whole and affirm itself as an expressive organism.
When the tool gets to be the prolongation, we can hear the material
song from her hand.
Dynamic compass, draws up the heliac symbol, curves circle, spirit
image, radial communications into her centrifuge will of egocentric
inflation that compresses the energy and originates the implosion.
Yvonne Domenge's sculptures want to go to the geometrical centre of the
maximum visual interest, cosmic abstraction where the one begins and
the last one finds itself Your central point!
Her spheres are, as life itself in curves, without any ending and it's
round if we could see it from the centre.
Structural sculptures are suspended up high. In spite of gravity,
skeletons made out of wood, bronze, steel or stone elevate themselves
spiritually.
Her ribbons of continuous movements do not have a beginning nor an end,
they are into the space and time when we observe them. Its an eternal
return.
Creative movements that breath, expand themselves, contract themselves
Organic unit! Order and chaos come together and harmony is born.
Agustn Hernndez
Architect
February 2000
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The Space of the Abstraction (fragment),
Notes for a Collection of Century XXI,
“In the field of geometric sculpture, her
colorful sculptures that reveal the interior and the essence of the
nature's shapes make Yvonne Domenge stand out. Clytia seems to be a
great seed, a life germ, and it's made by other parts that makes up a
sensual and wavy whole contained into a sphere of great dimension”.
Agustn Arteaga
Art Critic
2000
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Yvonne Domenge in the National Polytechnic
Institute
The sculptor's inspiration is not only
philosophical, theological and esoteric but has also been motivated by
her great admiration of scientific knowledge, that has let her develop
her own conceptualization of the universe microscopic and macroscopic
structure: Thus, with a very high resolution electronic microscope, she
observes the atomic and molecular carbon structures and conceives and
represents themselves in symmetrical spheric shapes (Alusin a un
quasicristal, 1997 – Allusion to a quasicrystal, 1997): Her contact
with diverse astronomical information sources, get her to conceive that
the universe can go through expansion and compression stages. Domenge
intuits this as a spherical balloon that inflates and deflates itself,
getting her to skillfully represent it as a sphere with open and closed
borders.
From Yvonne Domenge's work we can not only infer about her perception
of natural phenomenons, but also of social ones, as a clear tendency
toward a democratic culture (like the ancient Greek culture that has
been a source of inspiration to the artist), if social equality is
conceived as the equality between the sphere center distance toward any
other point of the surface. In contrast, through her work of concentric
spheres we can interpret it as the description of our real society
structure with the stratification of diverse socioeconomic layers. Her
enthusiasm, optimism and hope in the future is reflected in her
sculpture “Flor de Vida” 1998 (“Flower of Life” 1998).
Jorge Alberto Prez Peraza
2000
Scientist
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Feminine Glance and Artistic Creation".
Exhibition "Eight Women in the Art Today
Yvonne moulds the steel to interpret, not in
a scientific way but in an artistic one, the molecular structures she
studies to give them mass, weight and volume, and above all, to give
the microcosmos some sensuality. She finds several technical solutions
where the steel, bronze and wood support the will of searching in the
enigma of origin. Combining the freezing steel with warm consistency of
the wood, the sculpture converts the invitation that exists in every
sphere to be touched, to enter, embrace and be embraced by it.
Raquel Segur
Art Critic
1999
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Open propositions in Yvonne Domenge's
Sculpture (fragment)
Domenge is one of the artists who calls the
spectator for a physic and mental action. Her recent pieces, together
compose a perfect route that place the spectator the nearest possible,
to the fundamental plastic elements – Light, colour and movement – and
they, also, lead us to an action into a space or into special
situations and ethics that enrich their surroundings.
To study in depth the effects of the superposition and transparency,
initiated in the eighties decade, Yvonne Domenge obtains outstanding
examples of ambiguous perceptive, combining, in her sculptures,
surfaces of colourful structures and of “optic movement”, this one
created with lines and geometrical borders plenty and emptiness.
She's an artist who inspires herself on fine arts or classical
expressions for the antiquity to our days, on popular arts and
handcrafts. She also, makes psychological and technological researches,
exploring several branches of natural and human sciences. She is
interested in industrial design, physics and astronomy as well.
In that case, the possibility of a radical esthetic change is also an
option. The finished work becomes an open proposition, the artist
becomes an innovator and the spectator an actor. The ultimated
objective is to suggest new relationships between the man and his
surroundings.
Bertha Taracena
Art Critic
1999
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Before a spectacle of geometric shapes,
A girl is attracted by a circle.
This one begins to turn on its axis,
Sphere's morphogenesis with its original integrity
They complement each other
with attention that concentrates itself
within its center,
Solitary unit
identification and symbiosis
being roundness and its existence
To live into its form
would be like avoiding our dreams
Security that we look for
if we could create it from the inside.
Is life round
when we look at it from our center?
Her father talked to her of the Greeks,
and she was trapped by the
universe's harmonic philosophy,
where the sphere is
the being symbol,
and she was identified with it
“It talks about me,
trapped in myself,
opened or fractured,
sensual and fragile or strong,
they all talk about me
and about my relation with the surrounding world.”
“My work is a reflex of my desires,
dreams, my fears and feelings.”
Hands and fingers follow
the wrapping movement
of the order's
sensual curve
and their great intuition
transforms the material's resistance.
Creative aggression
accompanied by its geometrical
will.
To Yvonne Domenge,
the poetry of her hands,
creates new fruits,
new flowers,
new suns,
wind, light and fire spheres.
Geometric dreams!
To Yvonne Domenge, the stars
are luminous spheres
that spin around
her head,
born from her planetarium love.
Agustn Hernndez
Architect
1999
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Kosmos II Exhibition
This work, that could easily be part of our
macro and microscopic world, transmit us the greatness of the cosmos,
its strength, and the inherent beauty of its laws”.
Ph.D. Achim Max Loske Mehling
Scientist
1997
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Yvonne Domenge
To Yvonne Domenge, the sculpture is a
prolongation of the feminine. Her pieces use the sensuality of the
shinning, silky polish of the metal or the empty spaces, secret sex
hollows that hide their evidences.Yvonne Domenge's work produces
pleasure to our look, her sculptures open several suggestions that let
us be part of a surprise that never ends up by closing itself.
Andrs de Luna
1997
