Daniel Alberto Criales Zarate
Bogotá D.C
Colombian artist, who works primary with metals creating unique design sculptures
Message
Daniel Alberto Criales Zarate was born in Bogotá D.C., Colombia, on April 10, 1989. He has always had the love and support of his family. He attended primary and secondary school at the Fundación Gimnasio Los Caobos and studied Law at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. His professional career as a lawyer led him to an encounter with the art world during the legal process of the succession of the master sculptor Edgar Negret. This event sparked a deep admiration and avid curiosity for the art world in Daniel.
In 2017, at the age of twenty-seven, without having previously touched a paintbrush, he began an empirical creative process, painting with oils and acrylics. This experimentation with various materials and techniques was rich in imagination and inventiveness. Two years later, he turned to sculpture, where he felt he had found the best way to express his creative ideas. He believes this plastic expression allows him to concretize works in the realm of artistic abstraction, imbuing the objects he creates with a unique spatial representation.
Daniel's sculptures reflect his concerns, interests, tastes, and pleasures, as well as his sympathy for fields of knowledge such as anthropology and history. His works also convey his exceptional affection for nature, which inspires his creative process. Daniel often hikes in the eastern hills of Bogotá several times a week, finding these mountainous landscapes to be a source of inspiration for his work.
Statement
What characterizes my artistic process consists of creating objects that evoke, as well as demand, admiration and respect for nature, emblematic values of the ancestral peoples who inhabited our current territory. Through the art objects of my authorship, I intend to transmit movement and energy to the person who contemplates them, interpreted as a sign of vitality, timelessness and universality; my sculptures communicate a message that was past, is present and will be future, since it is a manifestation of the continuous return to origins. Inspired by the material vestiges of ancient cultures, my work is configured through the exuberant rhythm of spiritual, ritual and cosmogonic symbols expressed in geometric language; It is a demand to contemporaneity for the vindication of the essence, of the natural, what in the past was an object of worship, adoration and consideration.
The technique with which the sculptures are made involves the metal sheets undergoing a copper plating treatment and then oxidation by a natural process; This process is carried out when the metal sheets are left for several weeks, and even months, exposed to the elements, that is, to sunlight and rainwater. Subsequently, the sheets are welded and treated with spray paint and other materials, in order to achieve the desired appearance, then they are exposed to the elements again to give continuity to the copper plating and natural oxidation processes that were already occurring in them. On some occasions and according to the intention, a sealing layer is not printed on the final piece, since the purpose is for the work to continue with its natural oxidation process during its existence as an art object, so that the work goes to be in a constant process of transforming its image, referring to an unfinished work, on the contrary, in transformation and movement, a living work.
The metal used to create the works is mostly reused CR Sheet (cold rolled), which turns out to be flexible and can bend more than 90° without suffering damage such as breaking the material.