The sculptor exhibits in the park of the Retiro of Madrid ‘The invisible’, the 30-day inaugurated an exhibit at the Macba in Barcelona and in December installed, also in Madrid, a work of 12 meters.
Three heads of women (perhaps a woman) ask for silence with the index finger on the lips. The three have the same dimensions. The three hanging on the iron structure that makes the domes of the Crystal Palace of the Retiro park. The three have their eyes closed. The three of them end up in a junquera of stainless steel rods. The three form a triangle. The three are an enigma.
The sculptor Jaume Plensa (Barcelona, 1955) received the invitation to intervene in this space, extension of the Reina Sofia Museum. Something more than a year, has striven to give form to The invisible, the exhibition that opens a cycle of samples in succession. Morning opens in Madrid. On the 30th day of November, presents a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (Macba). And in December installed a sculpture of 12 meters, Julia, in the plaza de Colón in Madrid. It is the most intense of the years of the sculptor in Spain.
In this deployment deck will be the entire path of the artist. Her work with different materials. Of the iron to the water. Of the stone to the fiber. From the paper to the light. “It’s fascinating to be able to work with so many subjects. For me everything is interesting when you think of a sculpture. The landscape. The people. The space. The country… All of it. And also the silence, which is an important material in my work. In fact, all of it is a conversation with silence”, says Plensa. “And, somehow, the silence is an invitation to talk with us.”
Spiritual, not mystical, Plensa thinks of the body as the engine explosion of ideas. And in the world as an arena of magic. And in the noise as a conspiracy increasingly unbearable. “What we do today as citizens is to bounce the echoes that come to us from all fronts, but we’re not talking about between us,” she says. “We are on the inside, as human beings, a unique insight and there is no way that we take it out. It is the fault of this present time not so noisy. These heads, which hang in the Palace of Glass are an invitation to rest, reflection and conversation.”
The light gives them new nuances to the pieces. Density, even. A completely different as there are more in the clarity or in the penumbra. At the fall of the sun are lit up converting this snippet of the Retreat in an urn without a secret. But at the same time in a public space. “The public space not only is it a roundabout or a street, but the common memory, that place where we all meet as a group. That territory is open, as is also a museum. Although the large public space is the water. That’s why I have been interested ever so much,” says Plensa. One of his works most celebrated is the Source of Crown of Chicago. And next year will install a few heads outright in the pool of the palace of Arts of Valencia.
Wandering through The invisible, and Plensa loose phrases that sometimes weaves or leaves exactly loose. “Beauty is associated to the difficulty. This is an installation that takes a while. It is not worth to enter and exit, but that requires a conditioning on the part of the viewer,” he explains. First thing you need to equalize are the eyes. After, everything else. “I never imagined that making something invisible was more difficult than making something visible”.
And is that the title of the set is not allegorical, but describes one of the proposals of this work: that the heads of the stainless steel mesh can be confused with the light, with the atmosphere, with nothing. In the manner of the chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu, the architecture is not four walls and a roof, but the air that is left inside.
Between one exhibition and another, Plensa continues to work on its other families of sculptures. Almost livable spaces. Men/lattice made of letters or phrases or verses continue to walk. And with them, that way of looking at this man he dumps it, with a serenity that leaves you to hear.
According to the criteria of
Learn more
