Eudald de Juana, Sculptor
Eudald de Juana is a Spanish sculptor and teacher who recently visited TIAC's studio in Florence to do a 3 hours portrait demo in clay for us. We took the chance to have a chat with him to get to discover more about this talented, young and cool artists.
Eudald, as he says, is someone who values time on top of everything, and devotes his time to trying to create something meaningful through sculpture.
His love for arts started gradually at an early age because he was born into a family of sculptors, therefore, the influence was imminent.
After school, Eudald studied Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona and after graduating he decided to enrich his skills by enrolling at the drawing and sculpture program of the Florence Academy of Art.
To him, Sculpture is the fusion between the act of building a real and tangible element and the ability to create an illusion. "A sculpture allows you to share the space with the piece and by going around it, you can feel part of the story it's telling, which gives you a very vivid experience."
“My favorite part is when I start touching the clay, it’s pure pleasure.”
Eudald confesses one of his biggest challenges is to be able to work from imagination as much as possible, in order to create new realities with his art. His inspiration comes from human expression and form, architecture, shapes and colors in nature, documentaries, museums and other artists work. His creative process can start either from a conceptual idea to be modeled in clay, or from an aesthetic idea through which meaning will reveal itself along the process of realization.
De Juana's style is a combination of realism and fantasy. He explains he decided to train in representational arts because it is descriptive, and therefore, stories told by the sculptures will be much better conveyed.
"As a humans, we are biologically made to feel attracted to what is similar to us. A representative art piece becomes a mirror to the observer, therefore, it is a very good way to create a connection between the art piece and the viewer, who, by empathy, will recognize himself as the main character of the story we are telling."
Eudald finds it exciting and creative to take a finished sculpture outdoors or into abandoned places to take pictures of it because he feels the placement of an artwork in different environments gives a new meaning to it, which can be surprising even to himself.
Emotion and dynamics are definitely two concepts present in Eudald's creations. His ultimate goal is to thrill the observer with the feeling of life combining human expression and abstract forms and colors. "I wish to create a strong impression in the observer in order to leave a mark in their minds so that they take home an intense feeling of the experience of being in front of a sculpture."
Being such a young artists, we were curious to know about the experiences that have fulfilled him the most so far. He recalls two specific moments that have brought strong emotions to him during his career. The first one was the day after the opening of his first solo exhibition when I realized the magnitude of the love and excitement received from the visitors. The second one was when he received from Robert Bodem, his mentor, an offer to teach at The Florence Academy of Art. "Just a few years before the offer, the idea of being a student in these school seemed a Utopia to me. After three years of studies, economic and language barriers were broken and I started to live a dream come true."
Photo by Rony Cadavid
Eudald's mission is to raise awareness on how important the visual sense is during the research of happiness. He believes "Visual Inputs" have a strong impact on human being's subconscious, which will both get activated by Art and express through it.
Eudald advice to young artists to work to improve every day and stay open to any kind of information, "...the rest will come by itself. Just keep going with all of your energy, when things are made with passion and strong beliefs, they succeed."