A "facelift" for the Virgin... and the imagery changed...
LA RAZÓN - José Beltrán - Madrid 23-07-2022
Javier Viver revolutionizes religious sculpture with a pregnant Mary: "I have been donated 10,000 euros for a healing linked to praying to the icon".
Javier has lost count of the replicas and variations he has made of the Bella Pastora. When the nuns of Iesu Communio, the largest and youngest contemplative community in Spain, commissioned an image of the Mother of Jesus for their chapel, this 51-year-old sculptor from Madrid was known and recognized as a Doctor of Fine Arts and had already exhibited in New York, Rome...
But that entrustment meant a quantitative and qualitative leap for him. "For more than ten years, the nuns of Lerma did not want to make reproductions, because they wanted people to be able to go there and live the experience of a personal encounter. I respected their idea, but last year they bet that La Bella Pastora could also be in people's homes".
"They looked at me funny."
About a decade of projection for a pregnant Mary, on a natural scale, hyper-realistic, free of gilding and crowns, and out of any niche or unreachable altar. "When I did the first pregnant Virgin, some people looked at me strangely, because I had a tendency. Some missed the haloes, others criticized the fact that it did not include the usual symbolic attributes, and some people looked down on her because they said she was wearing a gown. All that has been buried and disappeared. Now she is an icon canonized by popular devotion. The important thing is to have clear ideas and bet on the medium and long term".
Perhaps that is why, at this point, Javier Viver is not worried about being labeled as the sculptor of the Virgins, although his work goes much further: "I don't care, but the truth is that before it was unthinkable to talk about imagery in contemporary art and today there are many young and not so young people who are using that tradition as the basis of their conceptual work".
In any case, the secret of the success of this sacred "lifting" lies in "showing that the supernatural has a human component". "To the extent that Christ is incarnated, the Truth reaches us in a very human way, which is what I seek to show through the image. For it to become an icon of popular devotion, whoever contemplates it has to identify with it, faith has to be inculturated in every time and in every time so that Christianity continues to be universal," says the artist.
