Project for a Monument 1977

This sculpture, a 'Project for a Monument' by Pablo Palazuelo, looks like it was assembled from sheets and beams of rusted metal. You know, the kind of process where the artist probably had to get down and dirty, wrestling with the material to coax it into shape. The color and texture here—that orangey-brown rust, pitted and uneven—really gets me. It's not trying to hide its age or its history; it's all about the raw physicality of the metal itself. I like the way the base seems to grow into two narrow beams that point upwards, but don’t quite meet. I wonder what the artist thought about while he was welding this together. What was he building? Palazuelo, like his contemporary Chillida, was working with industrial materials in a way that echoed the geometric abstraction of artists like Mondrian, making us think about the relationship between the machine-made and the handmade. What does it mean to memorialize something with metal, and why make it look like it's already decaying? Art is an ongoing conversation, isn't it?