Lionel Messi, the Argentine superhero of soccer who is the highest-scoring player in World Cup history as of last week, has been monumentalized in a remote town in Patagonia. The stats: 85 feet tall, 70 tons in weight, and $130,000 to fabricate.
As reported by the New York Times, the statue by artist Aldo Beroisa follows from other creations of his including statues of dinosaurs and Jesus, and has been in the works for more than a year. “This is going to be our Sistine Chapel,” said the mayor of Cutral Có, a town in the Patagonian desert that commissioned the work. “You can manage to convey what Christ looked like, or in the Last Supper—what the apostles looked like is open to interpretation. But with this one, you can’t make a mistake. Messi is Messi.”
Beroisa committed to the cause, amid some serious obstacles. As the Times described, “He has defied the relentless Patagonian winds that pulverized Messi’s beard, Earth’s gravity that once snapped the player’s arm, and nearly broke his own neck to give his country’s soccer legend a larger-than-life tribute.”
And he paid special attention to Messi’s face, recognizable all across the globe. “All the public opinion’s eyes are going to be on the face,” he said. “If I don’t get the face right, everything I built falls apart.”
Now, Beroisa’s work counts as the largest statue of its kind. (Another enormous one was recently removed in Kolkata, India, over safety concerns—but, in any case, Beroisa made his 15 feet taller, so his stands to be the victor for a long time to come.)
