Jaume Plensa never ceases to be surprised “how well his works have fit” in such a peculiar and unique space in the world of art as La Pedrera. Although this retrospective formed by Jaume Plensa. Poesia del silenci had already been designed by the artist even before the emblematic Gaudi building was destined to contain it, the result, with the 108 pieces exhibited there, is of remarkable vital and spiritual harmony. Until July 23, everyone who approaches the confluence of Passeig de Grà cia and Carrer Provença will find the monumental Flora, the stylized head of a girl that despite its 2.5 tons – and on par with the facade GaudÃ’s stone building, which is 34 meters high and 84 meters long, full of curves and windows – stands out for its sense of lightness.
This is indicated by the curator of the exhibition, Javier Molins, who sees in this detail a first coincidence between the brilliant architect and the sculptor from Barcelona, ​​one of the most international Catalan artists. Plensa, for his part, assures that “the space has a strange point between the dream of a creator like GaudÃ, the everyday sense of a house, which is something I love, and the generosity of the place that it seems to invite you to enter someone else’s head. It was an extraordinary dialogue”.
Female faces that close their eyes and invite the viewer to look inside; bodies formed with letters that the artist proposes as human shelters; a magical forest of small resin pieces and their respective shadows; the search for the vibration of matter in two gongs manufactured with a sound technician in Italy; a double self-portrait, with food for the body and, for the spirit, music; a tribute to Gustav Mahler’s dead children, another to the impossibility of sleeping in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, another to the Peruvian poet César Vallejo… Oh, and a gigantic hand, Together, made up of different alphabets and which was exhibited in San Giorgio Maggiore, at the Venice Biennale, and which here invites you to raise your gaze to the entrance courtyard of La Pedrera. “It is a hand that does not order but rather blesses and invites not to a specific religion but to spirituality”, says Plensa.
The Barcelona sculptor’s relationship with literature, especially poetry, is the common thread of the exhibition that absorbs other recurring themes in his career: silence, dreams, desire, music, family. “We are in Jaume’s hometown, he is impressed by exhibiting in his city and that is why, I think, he wanted to surround himself with his favorite writers who have accompanied him throughout his career – indicates the curator. Now we have more of Shakespeare, because of the Macbeth he did at the Liceu, but the great innovation that Shakespeare proposed was that the conflict came from inside the protagonist, the enemy was the same: revenge, hatred, jealousy, love… .passions that come from the inside of the human being. And in the exhibition there are sculptures that are an invitation to look inside ourselves and to control or let ourselves be carried away by these passions. Starting the tour with Sleep no more, the first work in which he used lyrics in 1988”.
Half of the hundred pieces correspond to his conceptual stage of the nineties, rarely seen, although the new works are the most visible… On the roof, in addition to Silent Music IV (2019)–“I love that the people penetrate inside to take photos”, says the artist -, Day-night (2012), a figure that lights up and changes color at night like a lighthouse for in the city, like a watchman, since, as the poetry of Vicent Andrés Estellés said, “They did not give birth to you to sleep/they gave birth to you to watch”.
