Miler Lagos (Bogotá, 1973). Vive e trabalha em Bogotá.
Colombian artist Miler Lagos has worked primarily in sculpture, usually reworking a material so as to contradict the properties intrinsically associated with it. His Cimiento series is an example.
Lagos stumbled upon this project while working on a series of sculptures in concrete inspired by Leonardo da Vinci's war machines. The sculp¬tures were to be separated by a "trench" made from stacks of paper printed with Leonardo's sketches that he would cut into with a power sander. While cutting the paper, he noticed that it smelled like burnt wood and it got him to thinking that paper, despite its historic status as a cultural product, still retains many properties of its material origin.
For his new project, the artist turned to Apocalypse (1480), Albrecht Dürer's set of wood engravings, as a way to establish a connection between a médium and its subject. Each one of the logs in Lagos' Cimiento series is created from a stack of six thousand sheets printed with one of Dürer's engravings. The artist painstakingly cuts the stack into a rough sculptural shape with an X-Acto knife and then refines the form with a power sander, which burns the paper's edge, imbuing it with a distinctively woodlike color and smell. The diagonal cuts reveal the "grain," as the drawings, repeated on each of the sheets, appear three-dimensionally through the entire body of the "log." Each stump is an original piece, made with a different engraving. For some, the viewer is encouraged to peel off a sheet of paper, a gesture that replicates the democratization of knowledge that print has fostered from its inception.
Colombian artist Miler Lagos has worked primarily in sculpture, usually reworking a material so as to contradict the properties intrinsically associated with it. His Cimiento series is an example.
Lagos stumbled upon this project while working on a series of sculptures in concrete inspired by Leonardo da Vinci's war machines. The sculp¬tures were to be separated by a "trench" made from stacks of paper printed with Leonardo's sketches that he would cut into with a power sander. While cutting the paper, he noticed that it smelled like burnt wood and it got him to thinking that paper, despite its historic status as a cultural product, still retains many properties of its material origin.
For his new project, the artist turned to Apocalypse (1480), Albrecht Dürer's set of wood engravings, as a way to establish a connection between a médium and its subject. Each one of the logs in Lagos' Cimiento series is created from a stack of six thousand sheets printed with one of Dürer's engravings. The artist painstakingly cuts the stack into a rough sculptural shape with an X-Acto knife and then refines the form with a power sander, which burns the paper's edge, imbuing it with a distinctively woodlike color and smell. The diagonal cuts reveal the "grain," as the drawings, repeated on each of the sheets, appear three-dimensionally through the entire body of the "log." Each stump is an original piece, made with a different engraving. For some, the viewer is encouraged to peel off a sheet of paper, a gesture that replicates the democratization of knowledge that print has fostered from its inception.
