What is most attractive about the work of Jesú s Alberto Erminy is its simplicity. One of the characteristics of good artistry is the pleasant and immediate reference to the elements of nature, to animals and flowers, to heroes and traditional celebrations.

            For Erminy, the creation is based on what before was some stones and is now a pelican, what before was a bus steering wheel and is now – thanks to the transformative power of the artist – a graceful peacock.

We can put Jesús Alberto Erminy in that group of creators who work from a certain aesthetic code of recycling. Trash as a generator of beauty. Without a doubt, this is so, and it is already included in a broad artistic category, like the magical objects of Mario Abreu. In these works, what we did not appreciate before, here acquires much-deserved attention. Each piece meshes with its companions, finding its own connotation in the margin of its initial state: eyes made out of sliced round bone, bodies made of stone and so on, until it becomes a cheerful and vital fauna.

From the simplicity we mentioned to the new connotations of the object, there is a transformation that comes from the creator. Erminy is cataloging each minuscule element, which he gathers and puts aside until he finds its place without any need of putting it to immediate use.

            The parts can spend years until the artist finishes a piece. It is then calmly assembled, and the animal arises with its own position and attitude that characterizes it a giraffe always so stylized, the ostrich shaking its plumage, a toucan showing off its flashy beak. 

In his other sculptures, Erminy goes beyond the representation of nature in order to interpret it through sincere abstraction. In works like “the Water,” the artist creates nods to the color in the diverse situations and behaviors of liquid. An underground river, the rain and its rainbow, the water of the Molina and a stormy sea made from wood and a simple strip of color. Although in this series the reading is a little more complex, the simplicity of the matter prevails and the possibility that each part of the assembly speaks on its own of its beauty and its importance. To pause in the details of limpid forms of bone, in “the informal” texture of means and in the vivid color of plastic tells us that the beauty is in the Glance. A Glance towards the ground, where he finds the things we no longer want. For Erminy, those things allow him to invent his animals: his own small, silent zoo.

 

                                                                                                    Carlos E. Palacios