JAUME PLENSA One Tought Fills Immensity JAUME One Tought Fills Immensity PLENSA In memory of Richard Gray Contents Cover First published in Italy in 2018 by Richard Gray Gallery 13 Jaume Plensa: Introduction La Llarga Nit (Blind), 2010. Skira editore S.p.A. 875 North Michigan Avenue Installation view of Jaume Plensa, Palazzo Casati Stampa Clare Lilley 38th Floor Yorkshire Sculpture Park, via Torino 61 Chicago, IL 60611 West Bretton, UK, 2011 20123 Milano 21 Jaume Plensa, Sculptor of Images Italy 2044 West Carroll Avenue Design www.skira.net Chicago, IL 60612 Catherine Millet Marcello Francone © 2018 Jaume Plensa for his works 1018 Madison Avenue Editorial Coordination 31 © 2018 The authors for their texts 4th Floor Secret Garden Emma Cavazzini © 2018 Richard Gray Gallery, New York, NY 10075 Paul Gray Copy Editor Chicago richardgraygallery.com Emily Ligniti © 2018 Skira editore 45 © Jaume Pensa by SIAE 2018 Jaume Plensa and the Refresh on Beauty Layout Brooke Kamin Rapaport Paola Ranzini Edited by All rights reserved under Jennifer Rohr McMillan Translations international copyright 205 Inside Out: Plensa’s Works for Public Space Paul Metcalfe for Scriptum, Rome Publication Production conventions. (Catherine Millet’s essay) Becky Daniel Jeremy Strick No part of this book may be Nico Gardner reproduced or utilized in any Chloe Lundgren form or by any means, electronic 261 Toughts on Two Decades of Collaboration Raven Falquez Munsell or mechanical, including Fumio Nanjo photocopying, recording, or any Special thanks to information storage and retrieval Laura Medina, Natalia Rico, and 267 system, without permission Ariadna Vila at the Plensa Studio Image Checklist in writing from the publisher. for their invaluable expertise 279 Bibliography and support. Printed and bound in Italy. 281 Select Exhibitions, Public Projects, First edition Museum and Public Collections, Awards ISBN: 978-88-572-3464-9 Distributed in USA, Canada, Central & South America by ARTBOOK | D.A.P. 75, Broad Street Suite 630, New York, NY 10004, USA. Distributed elsewhere in the world by Thames and Hudson Ltd., 181A High Holborn, London WC1V 7QX, United Kingdom. “An artist must generate something much more important than his work, a new attitude to things. When William Blake wrote this wonderful sentence, “One thought flls immensity,” Blake was not defning sculpture in a physical way of flling space, but as a source of energy, of vibration, which emanates from things which exist in space. Our thoughts are a vibration, a sound coming from our body.” Jaume Plensa Te artist in his studio, 2015 Photo: © Catherine Panchout 8 Clare Lilley Jaume Plensa: Introduction n Lightness, one of his Six Memos for the Next hinterlands. The apparent simplicity of early Millennium, Italo Calvino wrote of his need to Romanesque speaks of the relationship between the travel; to have a sense of being unfixed in order for largely illiterate of ordinary society and the royalty, Icreativity to fulfill its potential. For Calvino, returning to aristocracy, and church that ruled them—imagery that these places was especially fruitful, allowing for both prefaces the more sophisticated and intricate practical familiarity and the intellectual frisson of the representation of the same subjects of the Renaissance new and unknown. For some thirty years, Jaume Plensa and later. The carefully preserved apses and church has traversed the globe, often living away from his relics highlight an early engagement with art in the home city of Barcelona and acquiring the ability to public realm and its ability to communicate to all levels communicate in six languages. This nomadic practice, of society. Via the Crusades, the Romanesque also linked to his studio in Barcelona and a vital professional began to portray and articulate a complex relationship and personal relationship with his wife Laura Medina, between a nascent Europe and Middle East—one that engenders an approach that has resulted in exceptional over the centuries has grown in importance and which exhibitions and some of the world’s most successful loudly reverberates. public sculptures. The necessity of journeying in pursuit Medieval contemplation of the liminal space that of understanding is a metaphor for self-discovery and both touches and separates the earthly and divine, enlightenment that prevails in cultures across the globe and of the sacerdotal functions of ordained priests, is and across time. In Plensa’s work we find sublime seen in artifacts of the Romanesque period. This vertical expression of the human condition. impulse, which like light connects human activity There are Christian artworks that speak to every with the spiritual, has for many years absorbed Plensa, faith of the anguish, loss, and potential of the dying resulting in works such as the column of light emitted and dead Christ. Hans Holbein the Younger’s The into the night sky in Breathing, 2005 (figs. 3, 181), at the 2. La Llarga Nit (Blind), 2010. Installation view of Jaume Plensa, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, UK, 2011 Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, 1521, in the British Broadcasting House in London. Less literally, Kunstmuseum Basel and the polychrome wooden other sculptures share the same intent, most particularly crucifix, dating to around 1468, in the Basilica the tall, white heads of girls, such as Dream, 2009 of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice are two such works. (figs. 4, 166), on Merseyside, England and Echo, 2011 A third, a wooden Romanesque Descent from the (fig. 191), in Madison Square Park, New York. Here, Cross, in the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in the slimmed and anamorphic aspect of the girls gives Barcelona, stops visitors in their tracks and a well-worn their lucid dreams a distance that reaches far beyond subject is suddenly poignant, overwhelming in its their material size, connecting the viewer to the skies intense pity and grace. This museum, which houses above and to their own core; to realms of possibility. entire apses rescued from Romanesque churches Plensa initially intended to train as a doctor, and during the Spanish Civil War, was an early sanctuary throughout his artistic practice he has been captivated Previous pages: 1. House of Knowledge, 2008. Installation view of Jaume Plensa, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, UK, 2011. Collection Textile Fashion Center, Borås, Sweden for the young Plensa, its treasures speaking of so many by the human body, although in his hands it is a vessel 12 13 sculptures, and on many occasions I have witnessed A route of intellectual engagement with literature complete strangers come together within the galaxy and philosophy unfolds across Plensa’s life. He draws of Plensa: extraordinary conversations and exchanges on diverse sources, from the biblical Song of have taken place that otherwise would not have Solomon, François Rabelais and William Blake to happened. Plensa’s sculpture is a place and in this William Faulkner, indicating the artist’s engagement place, people connect with one another, with the work; with fundamental thinking about humankind. they actually become part of the work. The sculptures Following grueling imprisonment, the sixteenth- are also places that offer privacy, silence, and reflection century Spanish mystic priest and poet, St. John so that within the maelstrom of contemporary life, they of the Cross, devoted himself to studying the growth become sanctuary. And like Monteverdi’s Magnificat of the soul. He wrote “the endurance of darkness is vespers, which so eloquently and passionately speak preparation for great light”1 and such duality persists of the divine and the erotic, they express both today in much Western thought. Carl Jung asked the spiritual and the sensual. of himself “How can I be substantial if I cast no 3. Breathing, 2005, glass, stainless steel, and light, 1,000 cm high. 4. Dream, 2009, concrete and Spanish dolomite, 2,000 x 1,700 x 1,700 cm. BBC Broadcasting House, Portland Place, London, UK Sutton Manor Colliery, St. Helens, UK for the soul. Through the face, body, vertical perspective to a worldview that is not burdened by momentum, vibration, and light, Plensa characterizes boundaries. Plensa’s sculptures and drawings the best versions of ourselves and communicates the deliberately depict many different cultures and potential of humankind; the intangible that faiths and ethnicities, while the Self-Portraits, 2005–2006, portray philosophies have sought to embody and describe. the artist in the guise of other people of different ages, Large drawings made in the late 1980s emphasize the genders, and ethnicities. The summation is an function of the heart and other organs. Later, a drawing unequivocal statement that we all are humankind. of the human skeleton is attributed with geographic Like the sound waves produced by the struck locations, our bodies synonymous with landforms to gongs of the Song of Solomon, correlating to a central which we have given names and categorization. In 2001, tenet in his thinking of William Blake’s words, “one drawings of the continents and oceans are given human thought fills immensity,” the sensory impact of Plensa’s identity through the addition of a single human eye. work ripples boundlessly. The public nature of the One feels the artist looking across impossible distances, frescoed chapel, transmitter of biblical stories and seeing these geographies in a single gaze, and giving of faith, is embraced and developed in his public 5. Jerusalem, 2006. Installation view of Jaume Plensa, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, UK, 2011 14 15 sculptural “families” are linked to Rabelais’s story In this he extends an inquiry that in the twentieth of Gargantua and Patagruel in which spoken words century is often associated with the work of Barbara form into ice and fill the air with crystal clarity before Hepworth and Henry Moore; in amplifying an spangling to the ground. We run our hands across understanding of sculpture’s formal properties, these the curtains, walk through the shimmering stainless artists pierced the volume to introduce light and space steel characters, listen to the chink and chime, feeling into mass, but also to reveal a philosophical interior.