James Mathison, Sculptor

James Mathison is a Venezuelan sculptor living in Spain. He works mainly with the human form as inspiration and as a kind of self-portrait.

We updated the artist’s identity, photographed and filmed his most recent works and his workshop in Madrid, and are interpreting his vision into communications through an upgraded website, catalog designs, and social network initiatives.

RETHINKING THE HUMAN CONDITION
María Luz Cárdenas

The central theme of James Mathison’s work is not so much the human figure as the condition that defines it: its encounters and disagreements, its philosophical nuances, demarcations, transfigurations, and fragmentations. The turn of reflection is housed in the ways of rethinking the status of the body as a map, cartography, a territory – the discourse that, from art, allows us to think of the human as a space of relationships and not a natural fact.

The first sign in this process is the archaeological articulation of the fragment, which assigns to his work a disposition displaced towards ancestral sources of knowledge, affections, feelings, and inscriptions that lead us to the open field of cultural representation as we can appreciate it in the history museums. Mathison remembers his childhood experiences in the British Museum when he saw for the first time the colossal winged lions that guard the entrance to the galleries dedicated to the Ancient Middle East: since then, in that immensity, he sensed his destiny in the sculpture:

“I have always had an admiration for the old, for the archaeological. A longing for what was left in humanity of these manifestations. This is an act of awareness of what I am and what I can be «