Luis and Leslie’s recent bronzes, as beautiful as ever, are strictly faithful representations of a marine fauna of mollusks, seashells, snails, clams, shrimps, prawns, and other crustaceans. Are we before another of Borges’ Pierre Menards re-writing Don Quixote word by word exactly as the original creator wrote it? Or are we now, as I believe, in the other end of the spectrum? At a place where we have life reverting back to the mineral world. A world of slimy primordial life secreting saliva of calcium carbonate yearning to go back to our metallic origins; billions of years of clams discarding skeletons to add one more layer of limestone and lift one more mountain range; or a coral adding one more branch to surface an island in the middle of the ocean. In the Universe form is in a constant flow of changes and transmutations: rocks melt and liquids solidify; light becomes matter, matter reverts light; life petrifies time, and time becomes rock to become life again billions of years later. A petrified forest is a calendar, but it was a cascade of light and water before, or as the Mexican poet Octavio Paz saw it, the agave is water and its thorns imitate the sea urchin and both are time petrified. Creation is an eternal close cycle of life, matter, and time. And the artists have seen that the sullen persistent mollusk that stubbornly ponders its geometry lesson of secreted coils or the spiral curves generated on a sea snail came up—billions of years before the Greeks – with the mathematical equation that graphs the tides, the movement of the waves or the orbits of the galaxies. Charting their helicoidal graphs, the mollusks found the formula to petrify time, to give it plastic consistency.

With their new bronzes, these two artists, perhaps unconsciously, are expanding the conceptual core that sustains their work. If in their vegetable universe metal and colors were perceived as luscious soft flesh, in their current work, the hidden defenseless animal has learned how to encapsulate itself with protective shells and metallic plates very much like our old Venetian friend Bartolomeo Colleoni. The inter-textual relationship that the bronze Birth of Venus (2005) establishes with Botticcelli’s masterpiece at the Uffizi is perhaps the best illustration of all this in the questions it opens. In the painting the sensual naked body of the goddess is as if the mollusk where she stands had encapsulated her, layer after layer of mother-of-pearl into a beautiful crystal of organic origin: a pearl. It brought to the world the light of human reason and pagan love. In the bronze sculpture we are discussing, the closed clams recall that the same gestation could be taking place. That the clam is ready to bloom into a lustful goddess. Or has the process somehow gone terribly wrong? The larger clam stands in a precarious balance upon the smaller clam. Has Venus returned to its original form? Are the valves the protective plates of something our times could not nourish? The clams are as lustful, if not more than the soft skin of the goddess of love. Is there irony or an obscene pun in all this? There are many linguistic connotations that come to mind. And perhaps all their bronzes are also metaphors for sculpture itself. Many more questions could be asked. Isn’t that the main function of art? To conclude, it is obvious that Luis Montoya and Leslie Ortiz have undergone an inner journey of reflection, reassessment and transformation of an art form they know very well. At this stage of their evolution they have discovered that time is not a frontal attack on the human spirit; something that we can abolish or should fight back by adding more plates to our protective armor. Creation is not an open-ended process, but an infinite cycle of transformations and time is the engine that allows the whole process to keep on going.