Yvonne Domenge´s 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.Chávez 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 Elène Domenge (Kitzia Hoffman), who was also a sculptor and a stained-glass artist, and at the beginnings she also studied, painting with Benjamín Molina. She entered the Escuela de Artesanías 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 Pérez 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.
Yvonne´s 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 life´s 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 Agustín Hernández, 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. Agustín Hernández 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 Möbius 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 Cancún 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 García Espino
Art Critic
March 2001
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Yvonne Domenge´s work
Mexican Sculptor Yvonne Domenge´s work remind us the Olmec culture. It has a great sense of “Block”, shapes are enclosed or contained, they don´t 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. It´s an eternal return.
Creative movements that breath, expand themselves, contract themselves ¡Organic unit! Order and chaos come together and harmony is born.
Agustín Hernández
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”.
Agustín 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 (Alusión 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 Pérez 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.
Agustín Hernández
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.
Andrés de Luna
1997
