Isaac Cordal, the artist of minature
ISAAC CORDAL, THE ARTIST OF MINATURE
Beware Mag
Text—Mélanie Gagné
The Spanish artist Isaac Cordal was born in 1974 in Pontevedra. He studied sculpture at his native town’s School of Fine Arts, followed by five years of training at the Canteiros School, an establishment specialized in stone crafts. Since then, he has been creating small concrete creatures that he places all over the interstices of cities, in the crevice of a wall, the crack of a pavement, a puddle of water…
Isaac Cordal produces denunciatory social art. The recurring figurines in his creations are a metaphor for the contemporary human condition. Their tiny size reflects the crushing burden borne by everyone in the face of scourges such as class struggle, oligarchy, global warming or the misery we witness on every street corner.
This aesthetics of the minuscule creates a certain poetry; the characters staged by Cordal seem to play a score of which we would have misplaced the sheet. They all seem to be caught in a scenario from which they cannot escape. But the minuscule also serves the artist’s humility, putting his social role into perspective and defending a humorous tone: “I try to use irony, but it’s never a joke. Humour is a way of dressing up the drama. I think we need a daily overdose of humour to survive.”
