THE WORK OF CODERCH AND MALAVIA: ARRESTED ACTION, INNER DISTANCE Every beautiful work is closed.It shines silently.Paul Valéry As if it were a relay race, many are the references that artistic creation borrows from culture, returningthem enriched with more arguments and offering them as witnesses of the new times. All of themresound at the back of the collective memory, forming solutions in order to partially reveal the mystery inwhich man is immersed, the mystery of life.At the end of the 19th century, the poet Rubén Darío wrote:“… And above the blue water the knightLohengrin and his swan, like a chiselledtravelling tympanum, with its arched S-shaped neck…”The poet is referring to the soft, white shape of the bird on top of the infinite horizontal plane, gentlygliding, without pausing, over the nocturnal waters in silence, in an image provided for visual contemplation.Its curves are a delight to the eyes; its placid wandering similar to that of a mass of ice chiselled by asculptor.Previously, Germany’s medieval tradition related how the knight arrived in a boat pulled by a swan,in order to defend a damsel with just one condition –not to ask his name. Swan, damsel, silence and deathare elements of a narration that would then inspire the story of Wagner’s Lohengrin opera.Later on, this German myth led King Louis of Bavaria to build his palace with white stone on the topof green hills, in the midst of the northern clouds and dampness, thereafter calling it The Stone Swan: onemore image alluding to a large white mass whose stillness is presented for the pleasure of contemplation.Musäus’ The Stolen Veil, continuing this tradition, became the story that inspired Tchaikovsky’sSwan Lake, a ballet of extraordinary beauty that relates how Prince Siegfried falls in love with the nymphOdette, who is turned into a swan by a spiteful curse.As a continuous thread, literature, music or dance gradually reveal to us the different layers thatdeepen our knowledge. They are the beginning and end, the starting point and driving force for the delightof those that contemplate the world, endeavouring to possess part of the beauty within it. Sculpture isanother great pillar of human expression. Seduction and fantasy arise from its masses and turn the materialinto an object of thought. They often do so due to similarity, sometimes due to evocation and, onother occasions, to resonance with other arts. They do so and move us with the characteristic argumentsof their discipline. Just as painting expresses itself with colour, dance with the movement of the body andlight, sculpture uses the proportion, shade, balances and textures of the material to move the sensitivespectator.I have been fortunate to become well acquainted with Coderch and Malavia’s art, a work of refinedsculpture that relates certain stories inspired by literature or music. Sometimes they depict classical mythsand, on other occasions, popular or traditional ones. They place and exhibit their pieces under the influenceof light, in which the outlines never end or invite us to contemplate them in movement, a peripateticcontemplation. The sculptures respond to light, invoking the gaze that becomes trapped in them. The lighton these works turns into a gift; it is, in the words of the poet Claudio Rodríguez, clarity thirsty for form.The depiction of the human body in Coderch and Malavia’s work becomes poetry. It is the substanceof contemplation and pleasure. With them, the myth of the swan once again embodies pieces such as theones entitled Odette or Swan, whose frozen images take us to Tchaikovsky’s ballet in which the dancers’bodies are expressed in full tension. Odette, half woman, half swan, offers the spectator a female body ofextraordinary beauty at the moment when she closes her wings above her head, to be transfigured anddisappear, condemning her beloved Siegfried to loneliness. Siegfried, in turn, is depicted dancing in Swansoul, hyperkinetic and frozen in the middle of a pirouette during a desperate dance.Constructed by adding volumes together, worked by clay or wax modelling, they end up cast inbronze with a desire to last forever. Truth, Goodness and Beauty, the three Platonic principles, are containedin these sculptors’ artistic work. Each of the pieces is conceived to survive the passing of time. Thematerial in their hands acquires expressiveness and forcefulness. They model the human body in classicalfashion, featuring figures that are always full of tension and movement, making the material speak elegiacally,sometimes bucolically, other times lyrically, but always with a high degree of poetry; always placing their images close to the limits of beauty.Their piece entitled The tissue of time, which depicts the patient Penelope, awaiting the uncertainarrival of Odysseus, is placed before the spectator with her eyes fixed on a space and time that is alien toher being; the veil she is weaving binds her hands, neck and head, and drops down in front of herfar belowher feet. Unstable balance, perfect anatomy, and complete…beauty.All of their pieces depict intense moments in the lives they relate, in the myths they evoke, but theyare all suspended in an evident enigma. The spectator inevitably wonders about the instants before andafter the frozen action. This uncertainty is part of the mystery, the very centre of the aesthetic circumstanceof these works. In Learning to fly, the moment when Icarus is about to jump, his fears, whether his waxwings will withstand the sun’s heat or what he is thinking, are some of the mysteries to be solved. In all ofthese works, we find the “action” concept that suggests a certain theatre-like quality in their arguments. Coderch and Malavia also offer us the sculpture of a dancing faun, most probably drunk, completelymobile, but full of youth and beauty. The faun is a mytheme that runs through the channels of culture; heis a sensual being, sometimes brutal, half man, half he-goat, who is present in bacchanalia, accompanyingthe dancing Maenads and the musicians of the night. Mallarmé’s famous poem L´après midi d´un faunerelates how the faun, while wandering in front of the smooth lagoon on his island of Sicily, during the burninghours of midday, mistakes two swans in the reed bed for two nymphs of the forest and feels a greaturge to possess them… A poem that once again evokes the imagery of Coderch and Malavia; it also inspiredClaude Debussy’s wonderful musical piece of the same name and the famous ballet choreographed byNijinsky.As we know, Culture is an inexhaustible source with which to construct, piece by piece, the grandbuilding of knowledge. Coderch and Malavia are another two actors in this beautiful human process thatis Culture.Juan Ramón Martín, sculptor