Touching Wood (Revised)

[Via SEE Magazine]

Wood Forms: Sculpture by Cesar Alvarez
Opening at Common Sense Gallery (10546-115th St.) on Jan. 15.

For most, seizing the opportunity to dust off a hobby and make it your life focus isn’t really in the cards. This was certainly true for local sculptor Cesar Alvarez — until 1998, art was a side project, something he tinkered around with in his off time from being a journeyman carpenter and father of three.

“I’d wanted to be an artist my whole life,” he says. “Even as a little boy, I’d be scraping wood on cement or chewing it into shapes. When I moved here from Chile in 1974, the circumstances didn’t allow me to go through with it. I had a family to support.” He worked instead as a carpenter until his youngest was old enough to be self-sufficient. “Then I went back to school. And now I am an artist,” he says.

As a graduate from the University of Alberta’s MFA program Alvarez has shown his work in various galleries around Edmonton to considerable praise. Although he paints and uses metal in some of his pieces, his preferred medium is wood. “I try not to get caught up in the preciousness of the material because that limits you,” he says. “None of my pieces are high brow and I mostly use spruce because it is easy to find and inexpensive. It’s more liberating that way.”

The tactile qualities of wood are as important to Alvarez as the overall concept of the sculpture. He subsequently puts a great deal of time and effort into carefully sanding and waxing each piece. “People sense things differently,” he says. “Some people touch from above, others from beneath. By smoothing the entire piece, everyone gets the same sensation no matter where they touch. At one show, people were hiding their hands at their sides and sneaking touches here and there. I was, like, ‘please, touch!’”

Alvarez will be showing five sculptures at Common Sense Gallery. Three of his works are a follow-up to a series of steel sculptures he completed for his MFA, including “Queen’s Beddings,” which recently caught the eye of New York art critic Piri Halasz. “I see this imaginary cube and I fill the cube with all the elements in my head. Instead of bursting outward, the forms draw you inside,” he says. The remaining pieces are from another series. [This paragraph has been edited for accuracy.]

Although he is passionate about art, Alvarez says he can’t take himself with the same seriousness. “I don’t pull all these grand theories into my work,” he says. “I see an image in my mind and I make it. If it changes halfway through, so be it. I don’t know why we are always forced to explain our reasons. I know the nature of the wood and I know the images I want to create. So I create them.”

[Images from top to bottom: Prince's Napery, King's Closet, Queen's Beddings; by César Alvarez.]