Jaume Plensa (Barcelona, 65 years old) returns to exhibit in his hometown with an exhibition in Senda, his reference gallery, exhibiting some of his latest works: figures such as Minna’s Words, as almost always, adolescent women with their eyes closed, created in blocks of heavy steel that reveal the grain of the wood that has shaped them. Also faces like Invisible Ana, formed by fine steel threads that invite you to surround them to see the multiple faces that we all have or, in the words of its creator: “How we are inside, the orography and the volumes that we create inside our body”.
Plensa returns to Barcelona, after in 2018 the Macba dedicated a great retrospective to him, “the most viewed exhibition of the museum’s 25 years [118.623 personas]”, Says the artist. An exhibition that arrived after 22 years of not exhibiting in any Barcelona museum, which, according to gallery owner Carlos Duran, “generated the unanimous desire to see a true Plensa exhibition. Without complex”. Something that Plensa claims to share: “I always agree with my gallery owners.” And he adds: “Whatever I do there will always be critics who love to destroy me and others who love to praise me. I’ve gotten used to it ”.
The huge suspended pieces in the Senda gallery (Trafalgar, 32) are part of The long night (until February 6), shows with which Plensa invites “to reflect on privacy; it is a hymn to silence, although it is more an invitation to whisper to fight the scream, because things can be said in many ways and I don’t think that to make ourselves heard we have to shout louder. It’s a mistake. As an artist you have to generate the necessary silence so that we can hear our little voices, because we are like David against Goliath. And this girl Minna’s Words, It represents a bit of all of us, ”he explains in the calm and conciliatory tone that Plensa usually uses.
In the exhibition you can also see Laura Asia, an elongated figure that changes depending on the angle from which it is viewed and a series of drawings, “ghosts that embrace the air,” explains the always mystical Plensa.
The title of the show confesses that he has taken it from “a phrase that I like very much: ‘No matter how long the night is, there will always be a tomorrow.” Because, according to one of the most international artists on the Catalan and Spanish scene, “despite the pain and suffering it is causing in so many people, if something positive has brought about this pandemic, it is the feeling of looking within again.” Plensa, a visionary, explains that, despite everything, these works were made “when I could not even imagine that we would experience this situation, but I think that in some way they already advocated this desire for interiority”.
The pandemic, however, has not affected him as an artist. “I have not stopped working, we have launched projects that have not stopped coming. What has worried me the most has been keeping my team of 14 people, which has taken me many years to achieve. I’m not sure I have to do works thinking about the pandemic; art has to transcend, it cannot be the journalism of its time; Macbeth it was written in a pandemic and it doesn’t talk about it, ”he recalls. “Human beings have the virtue of forgetting or adapting their memories to life, if not, we would go crazy due to the accumulation of pain. I have to do works thinking about my work, which has a very deep humanistic content, or tries to, and also embraces the pandemic ”.
Plensa assures of his hometown, Barcelona, that he no longer feels it as his own: “We are living through a pandemic of politicians. This city is going through a moment of neglect, as if it has lost interest in itself. I am lucky to live in Sant Just and this saves me ”. And he complains: “Here I have to be Gaudí and Count Güell”, in reference to the works he has done and donated to hospitals such as Sant Joan de Déu and the Clinic or the transfer, free and temporary for eight years, of the Carmela next to the Palau de la Música.
Outside, in the middle of the world, projects underway until 2023 await him. The most immediate are, next April, a huge 22-meter head for a pier on the Hudson River, in New Jersey, and a tribute to the toilets in the square of the Sacred Hearts of Madrid. “I look forward to accompanying them for their installation. What has changed the most in these months is that I have not been able to accompany my works, in the last process of creation ”.
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