Ernest Altés, a quiet sculptor, creates a large monument to the aviator Clément Ader

BarcelonaThe sculptor Ernest Altés (Vic, 1956) is an atypical artist, a quiet creator, the antithesis of posturing and contrived discourse. He prefers to work on commission, sometimes in collaboration with architects. And one of the main focuses of his work is public sculpture: he has created some forty pieces in Catalonia, Spain, Andorra, France, and Germany. But to achieve this, he didn't move to a big city, where there are more commissions and galleries; instead, he has lived in the countryside since he was a teenager.

"My intellectual raw material is the forces of nature, in the deepest sense: geology, geography, all the power emanating from a storm at sea, the calm of the desert," explains Ernest Altés, who this autumn inaugurated a large monument dedicated to the aviation pioneer C near Toulouse. It's a ten-meter-high, weightless steel structure that evokes the flight of a bird and, at the same time, a child's paper airplane. "Commissioned work stimulates me: from a city council designing a plaza to someone who wants a piece to hang above their fireplace. I'm a bit of a tailor-made kind of person," he says. Furthermore, for Altés, creating public works is a "privilege." And a challenge. "You have to dedicate your full attention to it; you can't just open drawers to see what you have, or simply offer whatever you're working on at the moment," the artist emphasizes.

For Altés, a public sculpture is composed of 50% the work itself, 25% its location, and the final 25% its scale. "There are sculptures that are quite ugly, but they're very well placed and the staircase is appropriate. And there are sculptures that are very beautiful, but they're excessively large," he explains. To define what a monument will be like, Altés makes an interpretation of the place "both physically and humanly." To develop Future, the storm memorial Alexwhich caused 18 deaths and widespread destruction in the Italian and French Alpine valleys. Altés conducted interviews in the villages of Cerdanya that had suffered similar downpours to those of the early 1980s. "Mayors from different villages told me that what comes after the tragedy is the most important thing, that the misfortune itself is of relative importance, and that what matters are the opportunities it opens up," he explains. The sculpture is made of iron, stainless steel, copper, and river stones, and the series of elements standing upright evokes thoughts of the reconstruction of the devastated areas. "It's one thing for the artwork to be pleasing, and another to consider what you want to convey; it's important to understand that these are two inseparable parts."

Among Altés's recent works is the memorial to Lluís Companys in La Seu d'Urgell, where broken iron bars evoke the fifteen times Companys was imprisoned, even before becoming President of the Generalitat. "I thought I knew his story very well, but when I delved deeper, I realized I didn't know as much as I thought. We all remember the execution, which is obviously a tragedy, but the concept reflects the significant role prison played in Companys's life," says Altés. In the realm of collaboration with architects, Altés designed the wall and fence that enclose the grounds of the Library of Catalonia on Carrer Egipcíaques, as part of a project by Joan Rodon. It's a seemingly discreet piece, but very elaborate, because it engages with the historical ensemble while simultaneously standing out, with steel pieces of considerable size and crafted using techniques—specifically laser cutting—unthinkable a century ago. "Whether people know I made it is secondary; I believe in this," he emphasizes.

A precocious sculptor

Ernest Altés created his first sculptures when he was nine years old, works made with found materials, including sea-polished glass, tree trunks, feathers, and leaves. He is the youngest of children born to a couple with deep cultural interests, which profoundly influenced him. "During the Franco regime, we received books and films from all over Europe at home because my father had friends in England and France. When Bergman released a film, we would see it in Vic," he recalls. "Depending on which books were published, we had them at home," he adds. "My parents were very close friends of Miquel Martí i Pol. There was a whole grassroots cultural movement, more than just strictly anti-Franco. My father was one of the founders of the Òmnium branch in Vic, the first outside of Barcelona. He led it because he knew Martí i Pol." When it came time to decide what to study, his parents encouraged him to pursue the world of art. So Altés enrolled at the Escola Massana, and later at the Lonja and the Olot School of Fine Arts. "It pains me to say it, but at all three institutions, they told me in my first year that I didn't need to continue because they wouldn't teach me anything new. I dedicated myself to it all day, I spent all day at La Massana, and at Olot I did in one year what I should have done in three," Altés explains. Furthermore, within this familiar cultural environment, one of his most cherished works emerged: the book he co-authored with the poet Miquel Martí i Pol. The silence“When I explained the proposal to her, she told me she had taken a sabbatical year and didn’t want to write, but that I could take whatever I wanted from her work. Miquel and I had talked about themes like silence, the horizon, solitude, and when I had already begun to reread her poems, the woman in *Mi hablado* hadn’t stopped writing about silence,” Altés recalls. Curiously, since the engravings and the poems are inseparable, The silence It was left out of the complete works of Martí and Pol.