It is April 15 and in Madrid almost summer temperatures are experienced from early in the morning. There are four days left until Telefónica, the great communications giant, officially celebrates one hundred years of history and the company – which in 1924 was baptized as the National Telephone Company of Spain – has wanted to start the appreciation of its anniversary by paying tribute to the day. Art World Cup, which is also celebrated this Monday.
Before ten o’clock, inside the complex that gives its name to the Communication Round, in a square flooded with green in the middle of the Telefónica district of Las Tablas, hundreds of people gather to welcome Iris, the new monumental sculpture by the Catalan artist Jaume Plensa (Barcelona, ??1955). “If I could, I would be my biggest collector,” jokes the creator during the public presentation of his new offspring, about which he has asked that they please take care of it, because he “loves it.”
It is the first time that the Barcelonan has collaborated with a company, although this does not mean he has stopped being faithful to his philosophy, whose fundamental pillar is to establish a dialogue, an interconnection, between art and public space, of which he confesses to be “in love”. “Public space has something wonderful: it belongs to no one and belongs to all of us; it is the great place, both politically and humanly, in which we can share things,” he explains. In this sense, he admits to having fallen in love with this multinational’s garden enclave, which reminds him of traditional Roman houses in which everything was organized around “a common garden where people could exchange ideas.”
Thus, he wanted Iris to be “immediately integrated into the environment”, so that one could “see through it”. This is confirmed by its privileged location in the middle of the lake of this square whose access is free for anyone who wishes to visit it and which aspires to become a kind of open-air museum, which already housed sculptures by other great artists such as Screech.
Now the undisputed protagonist is this piece: on a concrete platform built specifically for its placement, stands a six-meter-high stainless steel structure. It is shaped like a woman’s head, probably one of the artist’s most acclaimed and well-known silhouettes, which he has made his distinctive symbol and an inexorable part of his creative identity. Plensa is also the father of works such as Julia, the head that plays to mislead the perception of passers-by through dimensions and volumes, and which is located in the Plaza de Colón in Madrid; from Carmela, located on Sant Pere Més Alt street in Barcelona; but also many others that have been exhibited internationally, from Canada to Miami, Sweden or Rio de Janeiro.
With Iris, however, it debuts by hybridizing the portrait format with the use of letters. “The portrait is based on a young woman who I have sought to be very Mediterranean, very southern, very southern, an almost Greek beauty,” explains the sculptor. Its white color becomes even more dazzling under the iridescence of a sun that, for days, has practically been scorching, and that reflects all its splendor on the water from which the infinite roots of its neck sprout, generating an effect of eternal return by which everything returns and expands along the journey, making the origin, the future. And vice versa. No matter what angle you look at it from, the impression is that its threads and strokes intersect, generating a kind of network interconnections that are anything but random.
And in this context of “globality and enormous problems” associated with it, Plensa has aspired to be able to generate a “moment of transit between the I and the we”, embodying it in “a piece that belongs to all of us” and that represents “communication”, in order to look towards that globality, precisely, attending to all its potential in a positive key: “we are no longer in a place, we are always in the world. We fly over borders.”
Nor is the title that the artist has chosen for this sculpture trivial, which refers to the mythological genealogy of the name of Iris, a Greek goddess who is related to being in charge of bringing “water to the world” and fulfilling the task of being the messenger who would manage to deliver divine messages to human beings. In this sense, Plensa explains that his decision to collaborate with Telefónica lies in his own experience as a person immersed in a society in which the telephone has always been part of his life and that, far from being “something banal”, it represents for he “a bond that unites us.”
And it is that firm conviction about the importance of a paradigm constituted from, by and for “exchange” and communication that has inspired him when it comes to shaping his new creation, and what Iris’s head is composed of by letters from up to eight different alphabets (Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew and Hindi), as a manifestation of “diversity” in “our closest world.” Diversity to which it unites, precisely, that “sense of place” transversal to cultures that characterizes communications.
As José María Álvarez-Pallete, president of Telefónica, points out, “Iris is humanity in a world of technology”, a piece that “transcends” and that focuses both on gratitude towards the past and on the possibilities of the future. The culmination of this collaboration is that next autumn the Espacio Fundación Telefónica will host a monographic exhibition by Plensa that will bring together a wide selection of works by the artist and that will cover practically his entire artistic career.
