In the work of the Spanish artist Jordi Dez, the Mallorcan appears suspended on cables while performing a live
Having written the highest glories on the clay of Pars, Rafael Nadal took a new step towards legend with the inauguration of a statue with his figure in Roland Garros, who wants to pay him the tribute he deserves in this way.
He has been the Spanish artist Jordi Dez who has devised the work, in which the Majorcan, sculpted in steel, appears suspended on cables while he performs a live show, his most emblematic hit.
“I love it,” cried the tennis player as he unveiled a sculpture that would leave his feats engraved in metal in the French capital. “There is no more special place in the world for me than Roland Garros for this sculpture. It means a lot to me, it is a great honor, “added the player.
The picture of Nadal stay like this forever next to The Moseketeers, which marked the first years of the tournament’s history and that of the aviator who gives its name to it, which opened last April.
“The idea of suspending it persecuted to imply that the ball is going at high speed,” the sculptor assures Efe, who was immediately attracted by the idea of shaping the tennis player as the previous president of the French Tennis Federation (FFT), Bernard Giudicelli, expressed the idea of immortalizing Nadal.
Just a few days later, Dez submitted several projects and they chose his favorite, which has been erected on the tournament premises that is undergoing a deep renovation of its space.
800 kg stainless steel
It was a way of inflaming a figure that has broken all the statistics of the Grand Slam clay court, where he adds 100 wins and only two losses and where as of next Sunday he will fight to lift his fourteenth Musketeers Cup.
Dez used 800 kilos of stainless steel to immortalize the tennis player, in a work in which he wanted to capture the values that, in his eyes, Nadal represents. “Rafa represents many aspects, but they all boil down to strength, not only physical, but also internal, which is more important. That is the engine of the work,” he explains.
A follower of excellence rather than sport, the Valladolid artist based in Barcelona became obsessed with the work to try to capture his idea of the champion as closely as possible.
Went to Mallorca to take measurements of his entire body and made an emptying of his hands, data that he transferred to his workshop, where for weeks he tried to find the essence of Spanish.
One day, Dez acknowledges, he assured: “Rafa has come.” In his eyes, the tennis player had at last been reflected in his work and the artist recognizes that the tears wet his eyes. The sculptor considers “outdated” the idea that a work should be dedicated to a character whose footprint is part of the past and believes that currently it also serves to “reinforce with a tribute that Rafa is making history.”
“I am centralizing the emotions of many people at this moment. To pay tribute to a character in history is to try not to let his memory pass. But here the objective is to enhance his figure, his magnitude, it is another continent that seems to me more powerful, “he says.
Furthermore, he considers it particularly grandiose that his sculpture, the first to make a living character, is in Roland Garros, “the place in the world where tennis is most notorious, where it radiates most powerfully to the rest of the planet.”
In your conversations with Nadal, Dez found something of what he already intuited, “a close character within his strength”, something that he also believes to intuit in the Argentine soccer player. Lionel Messi, who would one day like to make a sculpture.
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