Auriga y mis juguetes de piedra: una aventura escultórica entre arte y juego. In memoriam Benjamín Martino

These pages are dedicated to the memory of the Spanish artisan Benjamín Martino Martino (1935-2010), in order to reveal the creative process of my sculptures made out of iron and stones. We intend to inquire how far the poetic experience can be constructed in a distinctive way of knowledge, bringing together some unpublished sketches, pictures and writings from several travel books. For this purpose we have tried to give an order to the creative stages leading to both the confection of the public sculpture Auriga (2004) and the current series of Sibyls, consisting of fifty “toys”assembled with small stones from Etruscan lands. Linking the artist’s intuition with the humanist’s analytical language, we will explore the bounds between Art, Play and Myth, the three main components of the works here treated. In this research, the wonder is also presented as the pristine mechanism of the creative impulse of the artist, the child and mythopoiesis - present in the archaic cultures’ meta-narratives-. Therefore, the sense of wonder does not lead to the suspension of human mind but to a strong motion of the imagination. This last is the child’s natural condition that the adult poet must fight to regain, considering perchance in wonder remains hidden what Stefan Zweig describes as “the secret of artistic creation.”