The incomparable sky of Madrid enters the Teatro Real. Its intense blue and its cottony, moving clouds will now preside over the large dome of its stalls, from 20 minutes before each performance and during intermissions, surrounding the enormous main lamp. Thanks to Cielo, a real video projection made by Jaume Plensa, who has recorded seven moments, seven different skies, from the theater roof. To get them inside and help, he says, “prepare the spectator for the opera, the dance, the show, to help him make the transition from the problems of daily life with which he arrives.”
“When we enter an opera house we enter with all the emotional charge of the noise, the street, of what we have read politically, of what seems fair, unfair, and I believed that we needed a transition to what is going to make us vibrate. on stage. Sometimes we lack this attitude to enter it in a more purified way. In this passage from real life to dream, Cielo can be very important. That the spectator enters and sees how the clouds move, just as As children we liked to play what a cloud looked like, a dream world perhaps more real than the one we usually live in. And I call it Sky, sometimes we look down a lot and up a little, so that people check when they come out to see if it looks like it.” , the artist stressed during the presentation of a work that will premiere this Tuesday with the Medea presided over by the Kings at the Royal.
A work that has taken 16 years to materialize, recalled Gregorio Marañón, president of the Board of Trustees of the Teatro Real, who explained that at the time the project was presented when the Real decided to “try to make a very relevant collection of contemporary art” with money that the state had returned to the VAT theaters. Marañón, elected president of the Real board of trustees in December 2007, stopped the project. “It didn’t make much sense for an opera house, and fortunately the collection was not made, because with the very serious economic crisis of 2008 it would have been a disaster if we had not had the financial availability and instead we had had paintings and sculptures to have. to sell”.
“Today everything is much clearer, the theater has a recognized profile and a very clear heritage entity, the building itself has been transferred by the State to the Real Foundation. And this work, Cielo, makes perfect sense. A window open to that sky that we have over the theater,” said Marañón, who thanked Plensa for making him “excited” to resume the work when he called him a year ago and for the “generosity with which you have approached the final result, making it viable.” Likewise, he thanked the patron and businessman Juan Antonio Pérez Simón, member of the International Council of the institution, who has paid for the piece for his support.
A piece that for Plensa is “of astonishing simplicity, that is why it seems like such a strong project to me, it seems that my intervention was none, there is not a trace of an artist, a gesture of ego, I wanted to imply that there are things above of us, out of our control. The theater has this false dome, this tondo, heavy, and I have not wanted to incorporate more elements, that in the 21st century we could paint the domes of the palaces not with paint but with light. We only need the angels, who we imagine will be among those wonderful clouds in this sky of Madrid”.
The artist likes “the cleanliness of the piece as a message, this work is almost like a sigh, there is no monumentalist desire, it is as if a whisper entered the room.” “I hope that my piece helps the viewer do an extraordinary mental cleansing to better open their heart to the piece,” he concluded.
