Letters, numbers, notes and signs are the raw material for the fascinating sculptural works with a human face presented by sculptor Jaume Plensa at La Pedrera – Casa Milà in Barcelona.
What better setting than Barcelona’s La Pedrera – Casa Milà to host an immersive and spectacular mix of the most intimate and monumental works by Catalan sculptor Jaume Plensa? At the invitation of the Catalunya La Pedrera Foundation, the artist has taken over the notable spaces of Antoni Gaudí’s building (not only the museum floor, but also the apartments, the “belly of the whale” – the sub-roof with its famous 127 arches – and the terrace) to design a labyrinthine retrospective-exhibition around the fragility of words and the poetry of form and gesture.
An alphabet-design of our thoughts
Letters and numbers, musical notes and signs intertwine around or inside sculptures with human contours, translucent faces and busts, to create a new alphabet of bodies whose pure design evokes an eloquent tribute to silence.
Seated figures, in bronze or painted metal, sometimes carried by spheres; faces absorbed in meditative quietude; humanoids or dolls delivering their string of pendular signs; so many silent performers accompanying us in a cathartic wandering, which the most massive works seem to hover over, like this hand crossing the space of the inner courtyard or this self-portrait sculpture with its hands over its mouth, overlooking the rooftops from its expiatory platform.
Bridging works
“A letter isn’t much, it’s something humble, but linked to others, they form words, and words form texts, and texts form thought”.explains Jaume Plensa, in the course of a few wall annotations that provide scattered keys to reading his mute works. In the same way, the inhabited design of his embodied objects forms before us the narrative thread of bodies imbued with solemnity and contemplation. An aesthetic choice that guides us and furnishes places in its own way, as if to create a litany of visible language bridges between physical space and the inner space of our minds.
Laurent Catala
