Enrique Arau

The sculptures of Enrique Arau are powerful and primitive Works of art that have fought their way to the light from the sensitive Herat of a man who experienced at first hand the barbarism of Argentina in the 1970’s.

One of Enrique’s most powerful pieces is called Runa *Rune(. This title is a good descriptor of his works as a whole. These works demand to be viewed from neither an aesthetic nor a religious platform. They are neither purely art nor icon, though they exhibit the individual vision of the former and the symbolic potency of the latter, if in a more highly charged and darker key. They sit somewhat uneasily in gallery or church, as neither venue shows them off to best effect.

The standing space before these runes is in some deep sense sacred. The sculptures belong in ancient, rough-hewn sanctuaries of stone, as in forged by Titans in the bowels and dungeons of the earth. We hear the clash of metal on metal, smell the sulphur, hear the cries, wince at the crush between hammer and anvil, and witness the gashes and wounds of hapless flesh and blood. They testify that something terrible as happened to this youngest of earth´s species. Violence has broken out among us, and the sensitive heart must ask why.

Some spectators are frightened by these works, and rightfully so. Many of these runes have captured the strong and repellent force of the archaic warrior spirit that dominated the ancient world and kept its peoples in a state of constant fear and war. In Runa, one sense a hostile presence intensely and violently alive.

Therefore, these works are affronting. We like to think of ourselves as modern and changed, reasonable, civilized, considerate, different. We act as if two thousand years of enlightenment and knowledge have laid this spirit to rest. This rune tells us differently. We have starved this force and it should have died. Yet somehow, it rears up out of the grave and explodes back into destructive life in the juntas and power elites of East and West and North and South – Argentina, Cambodia, Somalia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Iraq, and where and who will be next. This brutal force wreaks terrible havoc, and the human toll is vast before decency and courage finally gather to cut it down. Buried, it slumbers on in the dungeons of juntas and the dark places of the human psyche, and will not die.

These works pose deep and almost unfathomable questions. Sense those questions, and you embark on a journey to uncomfortable places and difficult answers.

Dr. Paul Heinrich