When your furtive and preoccupied sculptures are placed on ledges and moldings above harried pedestrian traffic in the city, we call it Street Art. When they are mounted in the soil in the woods amid deer and moose traffic we call it Land Art. Perhaps there are more erudite and academic descriptions of those distinctions available in a white paper somewhere.

Here in Lanpinjarvi, Finland where the days are short this time of year and even the marshy lands can be frozen solid, Spanish Street Artist Isaac Cordal is instead expansive, bringing a new trio of sculptures to the wild, and the difference between his urban and rural art is remarkable.

Isaac Cordal. Landart Lanpinjarvi in Finland. November 2018. (photo courtesy of Isaac Cordal)

“Logistically, the project was very complex as we had to deal with situations where the temperature was below freezing (the clay was freezing while we worked on it),” he says. “The days were also very short (at 3:00 pm it was night time), the distance we had to transport the material was very long.”

It is as if Cordal had been storing this energy in his work, unready to expand the spaces in between matter. His figures here have great ease, a whirring together of atomic energies that capture the action between actions.

Isaac Cordal. Landart Lanpinjarvi in Finland. November 2018. (photo courtesy of Isaac Cordal)

What are we, but earth and time – our elements are drawn from its elements, no more, no less? Here in the wooded area, Cordal stages a midstage, all of it amid life, ready to take it on.

Those miniature concrete businessmen that have made Cordal known in city streets, their faces and suits rough-hewn and rumpled and frozen in their existential mire, are reflected here in these life-size figures as well, but somehow these become accountable, relatable. Previously mournful, his new figures appear contemplative and rather at ease, not in need of a chiropractor – just a limb here and there.

Isaac Cordal. Landart Lanpinjarvi in Finland. November 2018. (photo courtesy of Isaac Cordal)

Isaac Cordal. Landart Lanpinjarvi in Finland. November 2018. (photo courtesy of Isaac Cordal)

Isaac Cordal. Landart Lanpinjarvi in Finland. November 2018. (photo courtesy of Isaac Cordal)

Isaac Cordal. Landart Lanpinjarvi in Finland. November 2018. (photo courtesy of Isaac Cordal)

Isaac Cordal. Landart Lanpinjarvi in Finland. November 2018. (photo courtesy of Isaac Cordal)

This project was carried out for Landart Lanpinjarvi, and Isaac would like to extend his thanks to Antonio Arosa, Pete Rantapää, Henrik Lund, David Eirin and Marit Hohtokari and all the people involved in the project for making it possible.

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