As well as the famous Entre-Sambre-et-Meuse walk, Saint Roch’s footsteps set the pace for life in the town on the river Sambre. In Thuin, there isn’t a house without a poster of the escorted procession in May, and not an interior without an effigy of the saint, in plaster, wood or resin. And yet, paradoxically, the figure of Saint Roch has very little presence in the city’s public spaces.
To fill this gap, Emilio López-Menchero took the plunge and gambled on dedicating a work to Saint Roch. For the artist, the only requirement is to create with the active participation of the people of Thuin, all of whom have a personal relationship with a figure that is reinvented each time.
In symbiosis with Thuin, Emilio López-Menchero has given rise to individual stories, in which Roch, saint or not, emblem of the land or symbol of universality, takes on many faces, embodies multiple characters. The fruit of mixed imaginations and interpenetrating words, this long narrative now runs the length of the alleyways, postys and stairways, engraved on the handrail fixed to the walls of the hanging gardens, accompanying walks and escapes, allowing itself to be caressed by curious hands and glances, eager to discover this singular and collective relationship to this patron figure of the locality.
An architect, Emilio López-Menchero (Mol, 1960) is a sculptor, painter and performer. His work is above all dedicated to the relationship between the body and identity, both his own and that of the personalities he likes to portray, such as Picasso, Balzac and Frida Kahlo. Emilio López-Menchero confronts and experiments, on the edge of a provocation whose boundaries he tests. In this exploration of art that challenges, he enriches the public space with interventions that are often monumental, questioning the meaning of the work in its context, offering it to spectators who, in his wholehearted and generous approach, quickly become his accomplices.
