Jaume Plensa is from Barcelona. He is a polymath of an artist. He sculpts from alabaster, metal, resin, plastic, iron, video, light, letters, words and gongs. And other stuff. He stages Operas. He has made the M62 a much better place.
In the space of approxiately ten minutes I think I recall him talking about silence as an antidote to our failure to communicate amidst the noise of our lives; the role of gongs and noise in creating community, the prominence of the sense of touch in the Mediteranean psyche, texts and poetry, classical forms, computer people, light and darkness and the common humanness of faces.
He is stimulating and engaging. He is emotional and intellectual.
And so is his work.
Some of it tripped me up a bit. Possibly some of it is too 'intellectual.' I am never sure about art which uses language. A number of his works are made out of words. This can be fine. A giant head woven from them uses them simply as 'materials' rather than as texts. You inhabot the words and they inhabit the work. But elsehwere beautifully crafted sculptures have quotes on them. It feels a bit T Shirty. Slogany. Great sculpture does things to space which you 'feel' as well as think about. The words make you do too much thinking and get in the way of feeling. Maybe this is part of his point. A sort of dissonance to make you appreciate the non dissonant. Maybe he just likes words.
There is no doubt that elsewhere his work is full of feeling.
His room of classically sculpted alabaster heads is a place of resonant beauty. I'm not sure what it makes me think. It makes me feel difference and love and humanity and oneness and eternities of time and happiness and hope.
And his room of gongs makes me feel that, just as every house should contain a drum kit, more public rooms should be full of gongs. And that more sculpture shows should include things you whack with mallets. Which is not to trivialise the art. The work evokes a sense of ceremony and ritual and subverts it with a sense of playfulness and joy. It's solemn and cheeky. Wise and witty.
Jaume Plensa creates spaces I'd happily spend time in regularly. It feels as though sculpture, albeit the big scale sculpture YSP does so well, almost limits him. We should be commissioning him to design airports, parks and cities.
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