Award-winning Portuguese chocolatier Jorge Cardoso has unveiled an impressive life-size sculpture of national football superstar Cristiano Ronaldo which was made entirely out of chocolate.
The sculpture weighs a whopping 120 kilos, stands at about 1,87 metres and took the chocolatier around 200 hours of his free time to complete.
He had already tried to pay tribute to his “idol” around seven years ago when he created a much smaller Cristiano Ronaldo chocolate bust. But this time he aimed much higher.
“After all these years of experiments, I wanted to try again and make a larger, more realistic sculpture,” the chocolatier told Lusa news agency.
Doing so required a lot of commitment from Cardoso, who spent around two months on the project.
“This sculpture was made in my own free time. It is a personal project that I really wanted to pursue. I studied everything in detail to make it look as realistic as possible,” he said.
But why pick Ronaldo?
“Apart from being Portuguese, I am a fan. He is where he is thanks to his hard work, effort and dedication,” he said, adding that his journey was similar to Ronaldo’s.
The hardest part about creating the sculpture, said Cardoso, was working on the face.
“It demanded a lot of thoroughness, concentration and research to achieve the realism I was looking for,” he told Lusa.
The sculpture is just a few days away from being completed. All that is missing are a few details such as Ronaldo’s football shoes or the Portuguese logos on his uniform.
Cardoso said he won’t be painting the sculpture as he wants to showcase the natural colour of chocolate.
“I want to show people what you can do with chocolate”.
The sculpture will be exhibited in Givisiez in Switzerland for two weeks starting on February 5 and will then be brought to his hometown of Ovar, in the north of Portugal, for the town’s Carnaval celebrations.
Jorge Cardoso has lived in Switzerland for 12 years, having left Portugal when he was just 17. He found his passion in chocolate and is now a master chocolatier, having been named world champion in Artistic Chocolate Sculpture at the Culinary World Cup in Luxembourg in 2018.
