Jaume Plennsa has been making silence in a noisy era more than three decades. His sculptures, distributed throughout the world, sometimes take a finger to their mouths to invoke it. This Sunday the meaning of his work found a reflection in the expectant mutis of the academics of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando who met at the Madrid headquarters of the institution to listen to the discourse of the Catalan sculptor and receive it as a new member of number in the sculpture section. And Plennsa only broke the silence to defend it as a common language and as a method for the union of cultures. “A coming and going from my intimacy to the public and community has undoubtedly been the constant tonic of my work as an artist. The transformation of the self into us“, The sculptor said when assuming medal number 37 of the institution.
Plennsa crossed ceremoniously, with a serious gesture, neat tuxedo and its characteristic black glasses, the auditorium of the Goyeneche Palace in Madrid, headquarters of the Academy, while the organ – recently restored – that adorned the place marked the rhythm of its steps. He went up to the stage, changed his glasses for others practically the same to help his sight and solemnity, the same one that resisted throughout the act – uniform start some laugh, although there were moments prone for it in the speech, to the academic suit – he began with his words.
Plennsa’s work is not understood without the experimentation of diverse materials. The same did to articulate his speech this Sunday, a great collage Created from texts, poems, reflections, personal memories: “an invisible self -portrait”, freely “polished, folded, hammered and soldier.” The result was a kind of artistic manifesto in which he has placed art in the center and has defended his work as a construction of bridges between “people and communities of different race, culture, origin or religion.” And although art does not usually need explanations, artists of artists often help glimpse their concerns and better understand their work. Those of plensa were clear: “Our society lives anonymously with poverty, hunger, violence or pain: wars everywhere, collective displacements, destruction of nature, misinformation …”. And he took that took that to send a message to his academics and other artists in the world: “At the present time, art is more necessary than ever and the creators of today must commit and risk, with all our hearts, in search of wisdom that allows us to imagine a new perception of spaces in common, both public and academic, museals, civic or political, that can help us crystallize the intense desire of the society The daily beauty. ”
Plennsa has done it, or at least he has tried, for three decades of work. His work, the most recognized, has inhabited and modified different spaces of the entire geography. From New York to Tokyo, passing through Madrid, Seoul or London. From Boston to Istanbul, with a scale in Taipéi or Shanghai. This is the Spanish plastic artist, along with Miquel Barceló, more global and quoted in the international market. His giant heads, usually women – “because I think the future is feminine,” said the creator in his speech – with his eyes closed “they are hilvanando an invisible network of places that bind eternally with each other,” said Plensa.
The new academic finds in his sculpture “the great mirror where the face of all ignored is reflected.” Each human being is a place. Every time a human being dies, a house closes and lost a place. My work is his memory. The frozen fixation of so many bodies developing and disappearing in the transience of light. My work is his volume, “the Catalan continued.
-The closest example of what he said could be seen in the stand from El País at this year’s arc fair. There he presented eight heads in alabaster of different features, in the name of diversity and miscegenation. One more complaint to the problem that worries him so much: the drama of migratory flows.
The Catalan enters the Academy to replace Julio López Hernández, the last great of the realistic tradition in Spain. For him, as usual in these ceremonies, Plensa had a memory: “He was a sculptor of great projection thanks to humanity that permeated his entire work and that unique way of developing his particular realism, whether from public spaces to his passion to transform the world of medals.”
His entry to the institution is a more recognition of his successful career. He regularly exhibits in some of the most prestigious museums, art centers and galleries in Europe, America and Asia, and has been awarded with prominent national and international awards: Medaille des Chevaliers des Arts et Lettres de France (1993), Prize of the Fondation Atelier Calder (1996), National Premi of Culture of Culture d’Arts Plàstiques de la Generalitat de la Generalitat de la Generalitat de la Generalitat (1997), National Prize for Plastic Arts (2012), National Prize for Graphic Art (2013) or Velázquez Award for Plastic Arts (2013).
The response to the sculptor’s speech was in charge of the historian Víctor Nieto who, together with Juan Bordes and Simón Marchán, proposed in 2022 to Plennsa to occupy the vacancy. Nieto reviewed the work of Catalan and stressed, above all, “his innovative artistic quality, his unlimited creative capacity and his plastic versatility.” “Jaume Plennsa’s sculptures are offered as a therapy and hope in front of one of the evils that affect the human being of our time: loneliness surrounded by a crowd,” followed the historian.
Before, Plensa ended with a few words that define their work and synthesize their artistic vision: “Every morning, when I open the study door, an earthquake shakes my heart. An earthquake that spreads desires and dreams everywhere lifting clouds of wind that mix my dust with the dust of others, my life with the life of others. silences … “. The sound of the organ in the palace closed what began with equal pragmatism. The hugs and greetings delayed the arrival of the new member of the academy, medal around the neck, to the toast in his name. Luckily for him, there was plenty of wine.
