Biography

VIKTOR FERRANDO

Biography

One could say that Víktor Ferrando was born in Babylonia one thousand years before Christ. The energy of his work is so old and at the same time futuristic that it has its roots in the depth of the history of human being and in the farthest away extra-solar planet.

He was really born in Calpe (Alicante) in 1968, with severe pyloric stenosis which kept him in an incubator for the first few months of life, when the doctors told his parents about the unlikelihood of the little one living. After recovering from this illness he spent his childhood in the country, with his maternal grandparents. Like legendary heroes, he was bred far from home, and with an inner and outer itinerary that nurtures a barbarous sensitivity and forms a solid but withdrawn character.

At 9 he was sent to Torquay, in Devon, England, where he started to study English. He became interested in sports when he returned. At 12 he finished the Valencia Marathon, coming first in his category.

At 16, due to his rebelliousness, his parents sent him to La Salle boarding school in Valencia. When he was expelled from that school it did not take him long to leave due to an absolute lack of interest in conventional education. At 19 he went to Cambridge, England, where he studied trade and became fluent in English.

At 20, his preoccupations and dissatisfaction with convention life took him to Denmark, where he spent a long time in a collectivist farm. There he discovered painting and Surrealist poetry, and became fascinated by Salvador Dalí’s art. When he discovered that in one of the works that most captivated him,Premonition of Civil War, was in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in the USA, he decided to see it in person. During the trip he wrote a collection of poems he called “Viaje al Infierno” (Trip to Hell), a work highly appreciated by the Danish poet Uffe Harder, who recommended it to the director of the “Poesía de Venezuela” (Poetry of Venezuela) magazine.

In America, Víktor Ferrando made his own excessive and eventful Odyssey, like any hero unaware of being one. For three months he crossed Mexico by train. He returned to the USAand in Miami boarded a cargo ship wherehe paid the trip to South America working in a Cyclopean engine room. In Colombia he had undesirable with the Colombianguerrillas. He was put into prison on the border with Venezuela for carrying politically incorrect books. After crossingVenezuela, Brazil and Peru, he returned to Europe to do his military service.

At 24 he went to Denmark again to definitively set up home and concentrate on poetry again, but three months later, thirstyfor learning more languages, more knowledge and more experiences far from family comfort and daily life, he went to Hamburg, Germany, where he stayed for one year and started martial arts. Specifically Taekwondo and the discipline of the Japanese sable or Iaido.

Trapped in a discipline that absorbed him more and more, he crossed the Atlantic again and lived as a recluse on the island of Florianopolis in Brazil, with his instructor and a Korean teacher. That is where he got the first Dan in Taekwondo. Some years later he returned to Calpe, where he continued to study and practice Taekwondo with the instructor Fabio Bernardo, until he got the third Dan.

After 10 years of learning and perfection, Ferrando changed the goal of his inner search and started in a metal structure workshop in his city. Under the direction and tutelage of a local blacksmith and welder, he discovered that forging and welding could also produce art. In 2003 he started to use metal to make his first artistic works. In 2005 he devoted himself entirely to sculpture.

In only 7 years he has become one of the most groundbreaking sculptors on the Spanish artistic scene. The perseverance and discipline acquired in martial arts and a talent that were storing up throughout his incessant Odyssey, are the basis of his creative work.

Víktor Ferrando, an admirer of Nietzsche, of the aesthetic work of Marinetti, and fascinated by the music of Arvo Pärt, uses railway iron and steel as the nuclear base of his production. His style, that he calls Neofuturistic, has culminated naturally in the “Planet Ferrovia” project. Inspired by the elusive textures of the universe, it is materialised in large-scale, hard and original works, a challenge that fuels the boiler of his production like a powerful futuristic locomotive.

VIKTOR FERRANDO

Artistic career 2005-2012

Without a doubt, the reveries of Víktor Ferrando’s work, formally demarcated, manifest that incarnation of the colossal that strange intermediate place where the sublime can be manifested. If in his most figurative period his work centred on the imagery of monstrosity, his recent works are mainly monumental, with an extreme firmness.

This artist, singularly intuitive, works non-stop, juxtapositioning materials, forging, assembling, in a risky and, might I say, heroic search His experience in martial arts that fight without a fight, has been useful for him in the sculpture world.

Finally human will in pursuit of the meaning of life is “such a strong will that it is capable of crossing steel”. Víktor Ferrando carries out his artistic work like a spiritual pilgrimage, similar to Zen, in which scrap or waste acquire another appearance, where unusable things acquire the dimension of myths. His speed, pierced with calmness, is also a way of learning to stop, of understanding that life is sedimentation and that you have to be ready

to accept risks without falling into mere passivity. This sculptor has not stopped running towards what he is obsessed about, in pursuit of channels that communicate him with the essential.

The sculptor Viktor Ferrando started his professional career in 2005. Since then his creative activity has been frenetic, and he has paying homage to dozens of personalities in the world of art and culture such as Stanley Kubrick, Guillermo del Toro, Jean Jaques Annaud or Miguel Hernández celebrating the centenary of his birth.

He has exhibited his constructions in several cities in Spain and represented Spain in the 2008 Prague Biennial. He is the first Spanish sculptor to have a permanent work in the city of Cairo, with his “Guerrero de Lucentum” (Lucentum Warrior), a colossal Futuristic Alexander the Great that is 7 metres high and weighs 4000 kg.

He has currently created a Project of monumental sculptures weighing from 3000 to 100,000 kg called “Planet Ferrovia” that is travelling around Europe. In this exhibition the sculptor has developed an extraordinary scientific artistic symbiosis, taking the original structure and texture of the elements that make up the Cosmos as a reference, associating them with a particular vision that allows him to create structures from an absolutely unique and singular point of view.