COMMENTS ON THE WORKS

From the artist

"From the depths of the artist, emerge flights, transparencies and movements towards the infinite".
"The works have movement, they look for a strong harmony in each of the lines that shape it. The works have depth, which blends with the subtle air. The works turn abstract while they suffer changes in each one of their movements."
"Chaotic reality or abstractional harmony...I'm talking about the mutual agreement between figurativism and abstractionism. A clear harmony, resulting from the encounter between two movements, this is figurative abstraction".
Gustavo Velez sculptural process is the result of the figurative artist's flight, abstracted from the reality of our world.


From others

May 13, 1998
"(...) The marble brought in from Italy is transformed by this artist into works that play between the figurative and the conceptual, between forms easily identifiable and others more abstract, full of movement, light, shadow and search of the infinite".

Luisa Fernanda Restrepo
El Mundo Newspaper

June, 2004
After quieting for a long time, the sound of the pneumatic hammer pulls me out of a state that was taking the likeness of dream. Minutes before, surrounded by marble, catwalks and pulleys, amidst the dust, it could have been thought that this sculptor and his atelier were just remnants of Renaissance, in the vertiginous birth of this century.
Now, after meditating over his intense, wordless dialog with the stone and having seeing him -arrayed like a modern workman- wonder contemplatively around it, I have the sensation that the chisel, vibrating in his hands, will commence, not a search in itself but the arduous path that will take him to the encounter with his work.
Days afterwards, from the now revealed depths of his material, I will see, emerging from the encounter of lines and ondulating surfaces, the purest archetypes of the verb, the flame, the foliage, the flight or the vertical, opening rose or the love on the mounts of Venus. Atavistic abstractions, multiplying and confusing themselves in harmonious waves, or isolating and synthesizing to the most elemental form of roots or tongues of fire: reminiscences of mythology, of art history, of life; apices of arabesques which, in hinging space, seem to express Gustavo's wish to use his machines to reduce to dust the white metaphors and proceed sculpting the void with his hands… and the workshop again in silence.

Augusto Restrepo
Art Dealer