Female faces that close their eyes and invite the viewer to look inside; bodies formed with letters that the artist poses as human refuges; a magical forest of small resin pieces and their respective shadows; the search for the vibration of matter in two gongs made with an Italian sound technician; a double self-portrait, with food for the body and music for the spirit; a tribute to Gustav Mahler’s dead children, another to the impossibility of sleeping in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, another to the Peruvian César Vallejo… Oh, and a hand, a gigantic hand made up of different alphabets “that does not command but bless and that does not invite you to follow any religion but rather spirituality”, points out Jaume Plensa.
The Barcelona sculptor had already designed this exhibition even before La Pedrera offered itself as a peculiar container that undoubtedly exalts and gives a sense of greater significance to his work. There are 108 pieces that are magically absorbed by the rooms, patios and roof of Casa Milà, as if it were not a bout of what the artist confesses: “I think the figure of Gaudí has ??helped us from wherever he is, whispering words in my ear to accompany me and tell me where to finish installing things”
One of the iconic heads of a girl stylized/distorted in the manner of El Greco, Modigliani or Giacometti that Plensa has scattered around the world welcomes the visitor and those thousands of tourists they have in La Pedrera at the confluence of Paseo de Gràcia with Provença a must-see on your Barcelona tour. It is Flora (2021) and it weighs two tons. Although, like Gaudí’s enormous stone façade -34 meters high by 84 meters long full of curves and windows-, it stands out for its sensation of lightness, as warned by the curator of the exhibition, Javier Molins.
Immediately after, crossing the threshold of the entrance, the already mentioned hand of letters -Together (2014)- that Plensa created for the cathedral of Chichester (England) and that hung under the dome of the basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore in a Biennale of Venice appears suspended as an invitation to look up and admire the fabulous Gaudinian courtyard that serves as a distributor.
An extraordinary lighting job later makes the experience in the showroom less aseptic. Plensa’s relationship with literature, especially poetry, is the guiding thread of the show that also absorbs other recurring themes in his career, such as silence, dreams, desire, music and family.
Molins highlights Tel Aviv, for being the first time he used letters to make a human figure, letters that he already used on curtains, such as the one that Plensa invites us to transfer here to create, says the artist, those “wonderful childhood sounds, when we played with the metal curtains that were in the shops”.
Half of the 108 works in this retrospective that covers four decades of creative activity belong to a more conceptual stage of the artist, the one that corresponds to the nineties and that have rarely been seen after the fact. But at the same time, the presence of work from the last decades takes on a special force, like that Talking continents made in 2014 with stainless steel. A circle of planets and the shadows they cast.
“We are in Jaume’s hometown and he is impressed by exhibiting in his city. That is why he wanted, I think, to surround himself with his favorite writers who have accompanied him throughout his career and who we can see here -explains Molins-. Now we have Shakespeare is more present, due to the opera Macbeth that he has done at the Liceu, but the great novelty that Shakespeare proposed with his literature was that the conflict came from within the protagonist. that the enemy was oneself. And in some of these sculptures there is an invitation to look inside ourselves, and to control or let ourselves be carried away by those passions of hate, jealousy, revenge, love… In addition, the tour begins with Sleep no more, the first work in which, in 1988, Plensa used letters”.
“Yes, in 1988 it was the first time that I incorporated text into sculpture. And the thing is that my visual culture is text, my house, as a child, was full of books, and I decided to use it as material, not to say something but for his presence. And I couldn’t resist the temptation to use one of my favorite authors like Shakespeare, and especially Macbeth, when he tells his wife that he can’t sleep anymore. Sculpture has a great ability to talk about that, about invisible things”, says Plensa.
The monumentality coexists with the medium format pieces that complete the exhibition in the room. “Something that goes very well with Gaudí are the two Carrara marble heads with faces carved with letters from different alphabets,” adds the curator. He refers to Chloe’s World III and Paula’s World II, in which he sees parallels with the building: “A woman’s face is still the facade of a person, and at the same time that of the building, since Gaudí also sculpted on the stone phrases like ‘Ave gratia plena dominus tecum'”.
In turn, the curator places the accent on Day and Night, one of the two sculptures that can be seen on the roof… “This comes from a poem by Vicent Andrés Estellés, one that says ‘No t’han parit per a dormir /et pariren per a vetllar’, and that I think is going to watch over Barcelona night from the rooftop of La Pedrera. A watchman who changes color, visible 24 hours a day from Passeig de Gràcia, so that this exhibition lights up the city all night,” he points out.
Plensa warns that the exhibition was already planned before La Pedrera’s invitation to show. “And we have been surprised by how well they have fit into this space so peculiar and unique in the world of art. Here the space has that strange point between the dreaminess of a creator like Gaudí, the everyday sense of a house and the generosity of the place that invites you to enter another person’s head. I think it’s been an extraordinary dialogue.”
The artist assures that with this exhibition he has discovered that he has spent 50 years talking about silence and the inability to sleep, and about the biological importance of words and letters in thought, “as if we were interpreters of our own voice and our music,” he concludes.
