There are still people who, even if it is by email, write letters of love, friendship or thanks. Jaume Plensa is part of that group, although he expresses those feelings with his sculptures, veritable epistles handwritten with a hammer and chisel in alabaster, marble, stainless steel or bronze.
See Lamín, name of person and title of one of his works, an innovation in his long career. “It is the first piece I have ever made dedicated to a man,” he says at the Lelong Gallery, in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, where he opened the exhibition last Friday. Nest (Nest ), nine creations resulting from the pandemic closure.
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The exhibition (until December 21) arrives in its American moment, after the facilities of Water’s Soul ( the soul of the water), in a New Jersey berth, its highest composition (22 meters), and Utopia , placed in a building in Greater Rapids (Michigan).
“I have always done women because I believe that memory is female, and the future as well, but this case had fascinated me.” Lamín’s – it is of extraordinary masculine beauty – is not one of his gigantic heads. Rather it is garden size. “We are friends”, reveals Plensa, rarely given to talking about his inspirations.
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Born in Ghana, lives in Girona. “I admire him. He made the trip from one continent to another to seek a better life, he integrated himself, he created a family ”, he adds.
In the exhibition there is a pocket head, compared to the rest, which rests in the artist’s hands
Under the concept of nest – “you are forming it around yourself with small branches and it can be the origin of a place -, he has taken a new step in his creativity with three faces of girls – Lucia, Flora and Hortensia – integrated into as many stones. “Michelangelo used to say that sculpture is to liberate the imprisoned form within the stone,” he recalls.
He has put them in conversation with Carla and Lara, three meters tall, cast in stainless steel and compressed profile, made with the false idea of volume. “From the front it seems that the figures are complete, but when you move you see that they are not,” he says. And so it happens.
Lamín in the foreground
In addition to Lara, located near Lamín, María is alone in a room Whispering (whisper) of 2.50 meters, from Zaragoza and “with a brutal aura”, he confesses.
“I follow the tradition that the Romans used to make the columns of the temples, which are divided into blocks and in the middle there is a lead fig leaf, which absorbs any irregularity and acts as a glue”, he points out. Maria has black lines, lead in marble.
Plensa also presents three innovative sculptures that emerge from the stones
One detail remains. Is named Hortense in Slumberland , in the land of dreams. She is another girl, made of bronze and closed eyes, a hallmark of the author.
In part it means a return to the nest, to birth. It is a pocket-sized head if you compare it with the rest, as it did in its origins. It has another originality. Hortense rests on two hands. It is Plensa’s hands that chisel his cards.
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