This is the second solo exhibition of Eric Aman in STOA Gallery. From 18^th of September to 16^th of November 2018.

This French artist, born in Algeria, began his training in France, where he developed an enormous fascination with French classicism that would inevitably lead him to Italy, the birthplace of the Renaissance and the rediscovery of the classical world.

In Italy he lived and worked for 17 years, developing an artistic career with very important awards and exhibitions, and his relationship with Italy is still there, as he maintains a workshop in Carrara. For family reasons Eric comes to Spain, where he currently lives and works, specifically in Malaga. Málaga has brought to Eric the light of the south, the warmth of its people, and that magic that only exists on the shores of the Mediterranean. A spell that seizes and seduces with its siren song the creator Odysseus, who dares to enter it.

Since the first show at STOA, ” Power of Plastic”, in 2014, there has been a significant change in Eric’s work. The bronze sculptures that make up “Iconology” are the result of a very personal reinterpretation of the descriptions and advice that Cesare Ripa wrote at the end of the 16th century, in the book of the same name, “Iconology”, a reference for centuries for the plastic representation of the allegories. Personifying concepts, values, ideas, virtues, vices by means of figurative representation is a difficult challenge in which this classic about the theory of images is the ideal door to try to approach the world of allegories and the elaboration of new mythologies, a project on which this sculptor has been working for four years.

The result is anthropomorphic figures that have a deceptive films air of aliens. For Ripa, every allegory must be enigmatic and must not be easily understood, and Eric’s bronzes are thus enigmatic and difficult to understand, since they are epigraphic sculptures in which letters and signs of ancient undeciphered alphabets appear, such as Etruscan, or the Iberian, whose reading is possible, but not its translation.

Just as Ripa used numerous sources of information for his book, emphasizing classical mythology, Eric uses multiple channels, a product of his eminently classical training. These allegories and mythological beings, made in bronze to the lost wax, unique pieces, are the result of an eclecticism that is part of French classicism, it absorbs the Italian Renaissance and its “revivals”, and merges and fuses in Spain with all the creativity that beats and grows in the South.