Hacer - The Fold

#

Hacer welding one of his origami inspired pieces

by Jack Muramatsu

The shape at hand offers basic folds, limitless possibilities. Sleek, angular and pointed, it doesn't reference the familiar. Rather, it showcases the primary elements of Origami, the art and craft of Japanese paper folding.

Learned as a child, the basic, yet essential mountain and valley folds formed the basis of the traditional crane and then, endless variations. What began as a way to interact with other children, a social currency of sorts, would eventually blossom decades later into the driving inspiration behind Hacer's art -- large Origami-inspired sculptures realized in metal, folded and welded by his hand.

Building on his first experiences, decades ago, of creating animals from one precise fold and another and then another, Hacer's previous shows have offered familiar and beloved animal forms including noble bears and loyal, playful dogs. For his newest exhibition, “Hacer: The Fold”, at Ground Floor gallery in Downtown LA, he has chosen to pare things down, relying on the previously mentioned minimalist Origami form. The entire collection will be, created from one single shape, rendered in powder coated metal.

The choice, an ambitious one, is a reaction to an internal need to return to the essence of creation without the weight of pre-existing archetypes. It also focuses the viewers’ attention to the folds themselves.

The familiar appeal and instant recognizability of Hacer’s previous animal works including pieces from his Dogami Series tend to hide the beauty of the underlying folds which give them life. By presenting an exhibition using a single form (and its inverse), Hacer offers viewers an opportunity to appreciate the folds and their possibilities in a more direct, perhaps unavoidable fashion. No longer masked by an instantly recognizable shape, the beauty of the form and by extension his practice and creativity is highlighted. This is his work at its purest form, something akin to a painter’s single, emotive, powerful brush stroke.

In a sense, the move to strip his work down to a single form offers a window into what drives Hacer. Born into a life of gangs to parents who gave him up to the foster system, he found temporary, fleeting solace in art, drawing and through a chance encounter, Origami. Unable to avoid the fate that he had been born into, Hacer succumbed to gangs in his teens. Art, once a passion was pushed into the background. As he emerged from a desperate, challenging life, he found his true calling and sense of purpose in Calder’s ‘Four Arches’ sculpture. Creating physical objects, he builds on the work of artists who have come before, one fold at a time, and in so doing contributes to society. For this new phase of his life, the artist chose to let go of his parent-given sur-name instead opting for ‘Hacer’, Spanish for ‘to make’

The exhibit’s single form offered in 21 instances (5 large, 16 medium) present Hacer’s creativity for all to see, reflect upon and appreciate. His challenge is to decide how to present the 21 pieces, each the same form, in the gallery as a site-specific installation. There is no clear, obvious path. Standard elements of his practice, a to-scale model of the exhibition space along with paper maquettes for each of the pieces, act as a nimble space for exploration. Each paper piece, folded as he first learned as a child, is colored a ‘playful’ green to match the color of the metal sculptures. Taken as a collective whole, the pieces present Hacer with a set of building blocks from which a dizzying number of possible arrangements emerge.

Repeated manipulations of the pieces in the gallery mockup and ensuing reflection, have led Hacer to see intriguing and recurring possibilities – interacting with the space by leaning one tip against a wall or a column while another rests against the floor, forming flowing chains or trails of a few pieces, each one rotated to set it apart from the other. While nearly all of the smaller arrangements comprising the full installation are emergent and not representational per se, there is one clear exception – two pieces tipped to balance against one another, a visual reference and celebration of the momentous occasion on which God’s outstretched finger touched that of Adam, captured so poignantly on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel by Michaelangelo. This form represents what sets man apart from all other creatures, an ability and perhaps more accurately a need to create, word by word, line by line, brick by brick, fold by fold, a culture for others to appreciate and extend.

While still early on his path as an artist, sculptor and contributor to society, Gerardo Hacer has seen the value in reflecting upon the nature of creativity and the beauty of Origami. The use of a single metal form replicated into 21 individual pieces of varying sizes, illustrates both practice and creativity. Singularly, the form itself is a prototype of sorts for his work, a building block from which his popular animals arise. Collectively, as arranged by his hand, the forms, each one a mirror of the other, give form to the creative process, creating structure and freeing the latent beauty and elegance in a set of uniform pieces.

 

ADVERTISEMENT