“LEAVE MY hands free

and the heart, set me free!

let my fingers run

through the pathways of your body.

The passion —blood, fire, kisses—

It burns me with tremulous flames.

Oh, you do not know what this is!

It is the storm of my senses

bending the sensitive jungle of my nerves.

It is the meat that screams with its fiery tongues!

It’s the fire!

And you are here, woman, like an intact piece of wood

Now that my whole life flies to ashes

towards your body full, like the night, of stars!

Let my hands free

and the heart, set me free!

I only want you, I only want you!

It’s not love, it’s desire that fades and dies,

it is precipitation of furies,

approach of the impossible,

but there is you,

you’re here to give me everything,

and to give me what you have to earth you came—

like me to contain you,

and wish you,

and receive you! “

[Pablo Neruda, “VI – LEAVE MY hands free” from “Erotic poems”, 1933]

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Roberto Manzano Hernemez, born in Madrid in 1972, is currently one of the most important Spanish sculptors. Since 1996 he has lived in Urrácal (Almería), where he has carried out important projects and won numerous awards. His works, almost all in white Macael marble (but also in clay and bronze),

recall the aesthetics of the last period of the Renaissance, Mannerism and the sculptural concept of such important figures in the History of Art as Michelangelo or Bernini.

The subjects he creates can express the feelings and the most complex forms of the states of the human condition: purity and sensuality, love and pain, happiness and melancholy, beauty and ugliness … Contrasts dominate in his works: soft and rough shapes, temperament and delicacy, simplicity and complexity ….

Among the main works of him we remember: Yerma; Monument to the fallen poet Cano Cervantes; Homage to intelligence.