Photos: Leopoldo Luis
Polychromy is perhaps the hallmark of Spanish imagery of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with baroque art booming. People’s religiosity and the relatively low weight of the wood carvings (which allowed them to carry their saints images in the processions), encouraged the Iberians sculptors, to unleash their talent to create works of dropping realism (as the San Jerónimo de Juan Martínez Montañés, sculpted in Seville around 1610).
A polychrome statue cast in bronze recalls Irish poet Oscar Wilde, reclining on a rock in Merrion Square in the Dublin.
Living, quirky-looking sculptures burst without notice into our urban landscape. Plethoric of color and original textures, they tend to draw to them the attention of passers-bys on the Obispo Boulevard and its surrounding streets in Old Havana, once immovable, then interacting with the then fans. They always are theatrical and expressive.
