Agustín Cárdenas' most significative artwork was made in Europe. It was precisely in Europe, where his creation emanes to the world with a vigorous and widespread sculpture and the cycle of effective development in his professional life has passed, the world also recognizes him there, where he confesses to have discovered himself and adquired a full conscience of his ancestors.
Again, perspective set for the distance of the adoptive environment, play an important role in the revelation of identity. However, in Cárdenas` early works, made in his initial stages in Havana -hard wood, Capellanía stone-, are already present the signature features of his expression, the essence of the tropological resources as traits of his sculpture to find in Paris, a quick and ascendent evolution.Cárdenas is saved from the worn-out godfathership ''Eurocentric'' , also from the Chauvinism`s obtuse banality. His artwork holds universal progression.

The knowledge of those Cuban pieces, compensates the lack of notion about the huge work achieved by Cárdenas, exceeding France's and Italy's and that one made in situ during International Sculpture Symposiums. The present sample, supported by photographic registers of this work, can ease a first approach of it. Fueled by needs of widing horizones for his creative appetite, Cárdenas was one of the artist who perform the 50s' migration, whose large exile has transformed them in foreigners for younger generations. Paris meant for all of them a high-competitiveness risk and only few were successful in so tough test. Our sculptor took advantage from his natural talent and intelligence, in addition to the job´s experience, demanding strength, perseverance and rigor adquired by a faithful dedication at professors Casagrán and Sicre's local workshops. Possesing success, one of the most evident Cárdenas' features, is the preservation of his professional integrity from the artisan tradition, specifically direct carve which has languished in the contemporary sculpture, soften by the experimental emphasis in the use of perishable means.

By the way, regarding to precarious seeding sculpture respect to other arts, it's the most durable to time erosion, that´s why, it pretends higher perpetuity, has the priviledge of preserving man´s memory in what is most valuable for him: his spiritual relation with the world and himself. Sculpture is the art of past times, holding sediments of images coming from ancient epochs and assuming contemporary times without discarding those signs as main lexical subjects feeding its current actions. In the conciliation of both temporal instances, inserted within forms, lives the access to futurity. Cárdenas has given title to a 1989's piece Past and Present. I assume, his profound knowledge about stuff and form, his clear intuition of that sculpture´s historical feature, has allowed him to state, in all its magnitude, the problem between tradition and rupture, inheritance and modernity, cultural edges in which resolution resides the necessary value of atavic customs -that determinant ethnic-culture which has generated in art regrettable cases of imposture- about which Cárdenas has a non-embarrasing consciousness: he can't simply avoid his inmemorial identity because it forms his contemporary mankind condition and joins his cultural exercise as a totality: the artist see at least reduced the sculpture's dual historicity in the splitting of his material and argumental projections. He perceives the argument of his reminiscence or his pretextual character, to highlight the sculptural stuff and maximize it.
The artist gives to the sculpture, its highest expressive level, its original freedom and what it is: form. Cárdenas became an outstanding and restless forms creator.

In the artist´s work we can distinguish three main periods: His early stage in Havana -when he was already boasting his original signature tone, his own way of doing things, excepting the initial pieces, possessing excellent quality, under Bernard Reder's formal influence which profitably removed the young insular sculpture from the academic
remora-; until his arrival and residence in Paris, where he delayed for years the recurrent use of wood. This period is characterized by totem morphology, undertaking years from 1951 until 1964. The second period -1965 to 1982-, is determined by marble and other tough solids, such as, granite and basalt appearing; the sculptor used to go to Carrara and chose and carved materials directly from quarries, this full-matured stage is the most prodigal and diverse, forms reach a bigger abstraction and pureness, arousing together with its refined poetic connotation, that active and hedonist impulse to touch the surface after having seen it. Arp, Moore and Brancusi lectures had been renovated.

The third and present stage -since 1983- is marked by the entrance of brase: it doesn't mean the sculptor lingered the approaching of this material, it's a reproductive means he already used before but now, he intensifies its application, with it, he gave new airs to old pieces, but the most relevant aspect of this phase is the retaken of concepts ascribed to first stage. Cárdenas seems to be in possesion of a new synthesis; sculpture attempts another figurative subject, graceful, also having a kind humour, a tropological undertaking, signifying themes from human and daily life, for which, ancient hieratism and monumentalism has been substituted by figures of admeasured dimensions, angular but burnish, pleasurable to the eyes. It's the serenity near the climax of convincing and sensual forms. It's the recounting philosophy.

Courtesy of National Council of Plastic Arts.

See more information at National Prizes. National Council of Plastic Arts