It is difficult for Barcelona to value the public sculptures that it treasures. Few cities have exhibited works of such quality and, yet, they live so much with their backs to them. This does not mean that the citizen does not end up integrating them into their daily landscape, as presences that humanize the features of the implacable city.
The Monument to lost illusions (Malip) by Toni Batllori responds to this pattern. The work of the puppeteer who died yesterday in Teià discreetly arrived at its location in Rambla del Poblenou / Diagonal / Bolivia in 2015. It was inaugurated in a sober act by the then mayor, Xavier Trias.
Eight years later, it has been integrated into the landscape of that part of the city that is the hinge between the old neighborhoods and the technological metropolis that is making its way.
Neighbors and neighbors feel it is part of their day to day, although many did not discover until yesterday, after the news broke, that its author was the same graphic opinion writer who interpreted political news every day in La Vanguardia.
With the Malip, Batllori wanted to pay homage to lost illusions, but not in the manner of Balzac. If he wrote in his homonymous work an epitaph about the excessive ambition of poor Lucien de Rubempré, the Catalan artist sketched in his sculpture a tree in which broken dreams, in the form of truncated branches, are a natural and calm learning of renunciations vital.
Who knows what Batllori really had in mind when he conceived that unborn ramification of the lower part, or the upper cone, also truncated. But, as critics establish that once a work is inaugurated, it no longer belongs to the artist, but to the public, we would say that they are paths that we did not dare to follow in their day or that, if we finally did, it was always laying the thread to make our way back easier.
The dignified failure that the Malip represents is a collective failure, as shared was the gestation of the project undertaken by Batllori together with the friends who now feel the monument is theirs, of which 80 small-sized replicas were made.
Everyone would have wanted that last branch, the one that ends the Malip five meters above the ground, to be much longer, although Batllori himself, when sculpting it, wanted it to fall to one side to underline the finiteness of any illusion of life.
It was not to his liking to see that, in its final installation, the sculpture was slightly elevated by the base. I would have preferred it to be firmly anchored to the Diagonal floor. But he would have been pleased to know that yesterday there were people who, after hearing the news on the website of this newspaper or on RAC1, came to say goodbye to him in the best way that one can say goodbye to an artist: contemplating his work, turning it around to capture it from all possible angles.
“Why isn’t your name there?” asked Pepe, a 73-year-old neighbor.
–Look, there is your signature below; It’s the one from her cartoons.
And a find. If one faces northeast, with the Diagonal in the background, the Malip is someone who raises his right hand to say goodbye on a cold but sunny day.
