So, I thought it was perverse when the local museum (at the university, every thing revolves around the university) decided to have an exhibition of that sculptor's major works. I didn't know it then, but Luis Jimenez is apparently quite a well-known sculptor.
The museum procured several other fibreglass statues of his and distributed them across campus. The status were all of heroic (read huge) proportions and were generally eyesores. The local paper was filled with vitriol. It came as no surprise to me when some body vandalized the horse that started this unfortunate trend.
With so much controversy, the wife and I had to go see the exhibits at the museum. At the entrance was a "End of the Trail" statue. The "End of the Trail" is a particular favorite of the American Southwest, representing the long and arduous ride of Native Americans forced from their East Coast homelands by arriving white settlers. Jimenez's take on that motif was to put a Batman-like mask on the Native American and put flashing red and orange lights between the horse's legs. It was horrible.
Inside, the museum was filled with large ugly drawings and trite sculptures (a fat, head-less, skimpily clad man reading a paper with headlines screaming about Monica and Bill and news about genocide relegated to the last page). Mr. Jimenez was neither very impressive nor creative, I thought.
Then, I came to a minature of two dancers. The man was standing jauntily, his hat thrown to the ground and the woman stood behind the hat, leaning slightly away. The whole scene was imbued with tension, the figures breaking out of their fibreglass (the html link says bronze, I remember fibreglass) with breath-taking grace. That was one great statue.
The funny thing is, the minature was a working model for one of Jimenez's monstrosities on campus. The larger statue has nothing resembling grace or tension. In engineering, we have a word for this -- that something doesn't scale. His works are great in minature, but lose their power when they are large. So, why does he make them large and while, we are on the topic, why does he add garish lighting?
There was another wonderful minature, of a cowboy on a bucking horse. The notes said that the full-scale statue could be found at a park in Houston. I'm not going searching for it; I fully expect that the horse will have orange reins and flashing, bulbous blue lights within its mouth.
