A guide to urban sculpture in Pamplona

The sculpture comprises two anthropomorphic figures, standing vertically, facing each other and separated by an empty space. The execution of both figures appears to have been inspired in soft forms of nature-plant or perhaps marine. The work of Manuel Clemente Ochoa comes within the organic style, with a decisive influence of the natural environment that he himself has experienced in the arid yet vigorous lands of the Ebro Valley in the south of Navarre, and the Orotava valley in Tenerife. In his works he proposes a spiritual dialogue with the spectator. Up to the nineteen seventies, Manuel Clemente Ochoa focussed on painting, particularly scenery and portraits, within the framework of academic realism. He then went on to figurative sculpture, creating pyramidal or rising compositions,featuring torsos topped with small heads, full of lyricism. Around 1980, he became more expressionist and progressively schematic, displaying dynamic, even gestural, rhythms, although he but rarely abandons his figurative style.

Francisco Javier Zubiaur