Jaume Plensa. Chaos-saliva. Alicia Chillida

"A thought fills the vastness."
(William Blake)

This exhibition, the artist's first retrospective in Madrid, brings together twenty-nine large-scale works, and chronologically covers ten years of work. During this period, Plensa evolves in a radical way, from the iron work Prière, the same spirit animates them, but the most recent work opens up to the viewer, becomes more receptive and deals with immaterial elements such as light and sound.

Plensa's work, singularly based on dialogue with other cultures, maintains its own character and a spiritual heritage of specifically Spanish roots. Since his beginnings as a sculptor, he has never ceased his research on the physical qualities of materials and the search for space as energy, as a perceptible quality. This research has led him to evolve from the more objectual sculpture to sculpture conceived as architecture and installation, through which he provides the viewer with an experience, an experience that turns space into something necessary, in Heidegger's definition: in a extensio, which offers the possibility of spatium of the walk.

Plensa is united with the surrealists, Dalí or Buñuel, the concern for synesthesia, that is, the search in the plastic language of contamination with other disciplines, with poetry or music. This concern with opening sculpture and painting to language, sound and space can be seen in the work of Antoni Tàpies and Eduardo Chillida and, conversely, in the poetic world of Joan Brossa. Plensa shares with the first two his distrust of the purely formal conception of art, and the search for a hidden meaning behind the hermetic form, a search whose main models are Zen Buddhism and the Spanish mystical tradition: the suggestive power of the invisible. 

In the work Wonderland II, in his 1997 film, the artist places us in front of thirty-eight hermetically sealed closed doors. As Luis Buñuel did in the cinema, in his film The Exterminating Angel, the impossibility of leaving a room is presented. At the same time, it makes us think of Lewis Carroll's Alice, faced with the decision of having to decide which door opens the key to the other side of the mirror.

Plensa's work is articulated plastically through contrasts: extension-narrowness, movement-static permanence, darkness-clarity, materiality and immateriality, architecture and body, dream and desire, but above all sound and silence. The artist uses language as another sculptural element. The words, texts and verses that cover his works provide the cast iron, kerosene or polyester with specific properties and directly influence their sonorous qualities, as in the works of the artist. Love Sounds, 1998, and Full Contact, 1999. 

On this occasion, Plensa appropriates space and proposes a silent alternative to the frenzy of urban life. His pieces, in a delicate balance between formal rigidity and poetic narration, vindicate beauty and, like islands, articulate experimental spaces that are offered to the viewer as an intimate dialogue. This sculpture reflects on the fundamental experiences of human existence. Literature and especially poetry are an essential element of his work: Dante, Shakespeare, Eliot, Baudelaire and William Blake, who uttered one of the phrases that could become the artist's manifesto: "A thought fills the immensity". Space has become thought and the word has become sculpture, capable of supporting the weight of the world.