Literature is an inspiration James Plensa (Barcelona, 1955). Reader of TS Eliot, William Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe and also Vicente Andrés Estellés. In his workshop in Barcelona, the sculptor prepares the pieces that are sent to Valencia. Before we start our interview, I will say that Hotel Paris is one of my favorite poetry collections by Estellés. “We already have a lot in common,” he says.
The Bancaja Foundation is hosting its largest retrospective.
This excites me because the collection of works that are not very well known, small in size and format, but very intimate, almost bronze. It’s curated by Javier Molins and it’s a pleasure working with him. It will be a very interesting exhibition.
With the relevance of the letters on the faces?
We named it ‘The Poem of Silence’ because throughout my career it has given great importance to the way I have tried to convey silence. Create a parallel world where your thoughts or body vibrations can be heard. For me, text is like writing a note of our voice. When a musician writes the notes of a violin, a piano, or a clarinet, it is like we silently write down the words that are our voice on paper. The first piece I included text when working with cast iron was Macbeth.
Is this metaphor of silence a wake-up call?
It is a poetic silence. My workshop is on an industrial site and I’ve gotten used to the constant background noise from the workshops. One foot of my sculpture is in poetry, the other is in industry. The physical is like a strange mixture of the material and the immaterial, the invisible; all these ideas that we want to express and that are beyond us. Sculpture has this enormous capacity in the contradiction of its function. There is a media buzz overflowing with messages that we no longer know if the ideas are our own or come from echoes of other things that reach us. I’m talking about this noise, like not knowing what’s ours and what’s not. To be able to express an inner world that we constantly hide and do not reveal to anyone because we think it is inappropriate. Sculpture is directly related to the body, it is an extraordinary tool to talk about the soul that will be its complement.
Are eastern alphabets more attractive because of their letters?
Every culture has a way of expression. The Chinese and Japanese worlds do a lot of pictorial calligraphy because there is a philosophy behind the beat. You are writing a word, a concept, not a letter. Calligram is already a word. There is a moment in my career when I mixed alphabets from all over the world in those characters I created from letters. I was starting to travel the world and I had friends all over the place and even if you didn’t know it I found it interesting to combine all the alphabets you adored because it’s a perfect photo of where they were created. .
His work is always in body and letters.
When you see the Indian alphabet compared to ours or the Hebrew, the Chinese, it is extraordinary to see how we express ourselves, and this is where the creation of such characters comes from. There will be one like this, in front of the Bancaja Foundation building from England, where what I’m saying is very well understood. This man, this woman, this being is like the human body, made up of letters and lines from different parts of the world, since it has no gender. And it’s also clear that people can come in and be embraced by a universal hand. Even if it is not in the exhibition, it is a work that people can enjoy.
Hiding in his father’s piano, this boy exhibits his work all over the world.
Frankly, I’m not aware. I still have the feeling that I’m hiding in my father’s piano. My relationship with the sculpture is very emotional, so I continue to live with these sensations. I’ve traveled a lot, it’s true, an important part of my life. I couldn’t live without traveling, but with contradiction I need a spot where I can create, build and evolve. I miss the smell of piano dust. I remember Estellés’ poem at the Hotel Paris about the dust under the door of the house. I strongly believe in the concept that Estellés developed with such close sincerity within the universal.
He argues that the statue creates a bridge between man and soul.
It has an enormous capacity to create these bridges between people, but above all their spirituality. In 2015, during the Venice Biennale at the Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore, I remember inviting everyone with this spiritual will to represent my project ‘Together’ who wanted to represent it. And that’s it, no matter what religion, background or culture you’re from. We have no desire to be together, and sculpture has an enormous capacity to create these bonds.
He explains that many times the statue has this ancestral spot.
Yes, relationship in holiness. What we can’t write, and perhaps its purest appeal, is the absolute beauty that surrounds us with a crying mood, sometimes with a shock that you experience and don’t know why.
He made the doors of Liceu, and here he filled the Ciutat de les Arts with those huge seven-hundreds. What do you think of the sculptural space of the opera in Valencia?
Santiago Calatrava is a man of international prestige and has made an iconic piece for Valencia. One may or may not agree, but it’s indisputable that Ciutat de les Arts is the icon of Valencia and this was accomplished by Calatrava.
He made his opera debut with ‘Macbeth’ after the exhibition in Valencia. Will he do more operas?
I mentioned that the first piece I put the text in was Macbeth because it always fascinated me as a piece to read. I really like Shakespeare, but especially Macbeth and I read the passage “Don’t Sleep Anymore” that always fascinates me, the moment he realizes that he hasn’t killed a person, that the possibility of sleeping is possible. I’ve always argued that this is the best description of sculpture, that it speaks of the invisible while working on materials, and I used that moment when he wrote it to his wife. Víctor García de Gomar, the artistic director of Liceu, who has known me for many years, had that brilliance. They’re celebrating the 175th anniversary of the opera and he asked me to do that intervention on the doors of the building and he told me why he didn’t do a full project with Macbeth since I spent years designing sets with La Fura. . It was a poisonous gift, I couldn’t say no. I also direct the piece, the stage, the costumes… My own project. I put body and soul because he is very ambitious.
Are you working with music?
Very rarely because it absorbs me completely. Sometimes I turn on music while I draw. I’m listening to Verdi’s Macbeth now.
Will the world we leave to our children be worse?
What a question… My father sometimes said we had so much that we didn’t even know how to play. He thought the world he left us was worse than himself. Sometimes we feel we are leaving a world worse than our own.
Optimistic?
I’ve always been pretty optimistic or I like to send a message of hope. Yes, it is a very complex world, but I think we are leaving a different and new world, but as always. All these misfortunes in nature are very worrying, but human beings will react. The piece I recently installed in front of Manhattan in New Jersey is a girl with her fingers to her lips asking for silence. He doesn’t want silence from Manhattan, he wants silence to listen to the sound of the water again. Because the sound of the water seems to speak to us in a deep, ancestral voice. Sometimes we forgot to listen to these things of nature. If we all do our part, there is an interesting future, to say the least.
Source: Informacion
