Five years ago, the Barcelona scientist, writer and popularizer Jorge Wagensberg, founder of CosmoCaixa, passed away. The artist Agnès Rodon has been inspired by him for her exhibition If nature is the answer, what was the question? –Title of one of her books–, which can be seen at the Reial Cercle ArtÃstic in Barcelona until June 18.
The works are configured around the four areas to which Wagensberg dedicated himself: dissemination, research, literature and museums. All of them represented in a tour that reflects his legacy through multidisciplinary and sensitive paintings, sculptures and installations.
Rodon’s work also denounces environmental problems, a concern that Wagensberg reflected in his book with Joan MartÃnez Alier, We only have one planet, the scientist’s vital motto, which is reflected in a sculpture accompanied by a 3D video. One of the pieces is made with the trunk of a tree after a forest fire, as a symbol of the world and the need to protect it.
In her latest exhibitions, the artist plays with interaction and smells. Here, Rodon has installed a radar presence detector in some pieces and sculptures, which also give off an essence of forest nature, carried out by experts from the Ernesto Ventós Foundation.
Rodon dedicates an entire room to literature, with book-shaped sculptures that reflect the popularizer’s aphorisms. “For him they were very important, since they are the abstraction of a whole development, phrases that haunt you and make you think.”
The exhibition was born four years ago as a commission from the Centro Sefarad de Israel, in Madrid. “I knew the character vaguely, but I was reading him and I found myself involved in a display of emotions and sensations that overwhelmed me due to his wisdom.” The sample will travel to Mexico and Panama next year.
