There is a silent hubbub in Jaume Plensa's workshop sheds, Sant Feliu de Llobregat, Multindus industrial estate. His busts and human bodies, mute and still, emanate an illusion of movement and music; volume and voice detach from these giant forms that capture your attention with a common message of hope. Who are we, where do we come from, where are we going and where will we return: life is the journey. These are the eternal questions that art poses without answer. The journey today suspended, waiting.
---"One does not choose to be an artist, it is inevitable: art is a consequence," he maintains. In your case, of what is it a consequence?
---In any case, it is a consequence of your way of life and your way of thinking; of your attitude, your fears, your political stance, your ghosts. Life, then art, are defined by personal values.
---What responsibility does the artist have towards beauty?
---That of any human being. Beauty is one of the most important concepts in the universe and the artist must help others to be aware of where to find it, and does so by asking questions. Sometimes it has been misunderstood, or adjectivized, but beauty is above ourselves and has no adjectives, even if we define and interpret it in different ways, and according to the times, and even when grotesque elements have been used to represent it.
---From there, from that absolute conception, does the difference between pretty and beautiful arise?
---Art is beautiful, art objects are pretty. A work of art envelops a profound message with a form that is not its purpose but its vehicle. It is the difference between art and craftsmanship: artists are enriched by the artisan, by their knowledge of the elements, matter, techniques. But technique is not art. An object can give you pleasure, but art, to be art, must give you chills.
---Your work is very emotional, always responding to your life, how would you define your current state, or what is your latest work like?
---We are living in an unreal moment that we don't know how to manage, and therefore I don't know if I will be able to answer you. I have continued working, in a disciplined way, but I lack distance to answer something like that. Perhaps I will realize later what I am living and doing. Shakespeare wrote Macbeth in the midst of a plague epidemic, but there is not a single allusion to it in the play.
---Don't you miss traveling, you who have always accompanied your work wherever it has gone?
"---I do notice this a lot. I returned from Hawaii last February, and I haven't left here since. My sculptures have traveled; the largest one I've ever made was installed in Grand Rapids, Michigan, but I couldn't accompany it; nor have I gone to Los Angeles or Toronto, where others have been set up. Biennials, inaugurations, exhibitions are canceled, and this breaks me. Travel is part of the process, which is not just an idea and its materialization, but the interrelationship of people with the piece in a specific place.
---We saw it in Pedro Ballesteros' documentary Can You Hear Me?, especially in the sequences around the Crown Fountain in Chicago. You looked happy observing the public's reaction.
---It's an iconic work of mine; I've never wanted to do anything similar again; and the interrelationship of people with the piece is very ambitious. I remember when I was a child my mother used to take us to the surroundings of Barcelona Cathedral, I would look at those gargoyles and they fascinated me, and that's where the idea comes from.
---You also say that you learned to love poetry from your father, how was that learning process?
---My father was a great reader of novels; on Sundays, we would accompany him to the Mercat de Sant Antoni to look for books, and while we were there, we would exchange some trading cards. From his passion for books comes my familiarity with text as something graphic, and from his fondness for the piano, my taste for music, and then I discovered poetry on my own. I also kept my taste for markets, of all kinds; it's what I most enjoy discovering when I travel. And when I'm here in Barcelona, I love walking from my house in Sant Just to Plaza de España, and stopping at the three markets along the way. Commerce is an activity very close to human beings; in fact, the concept of a town hall is born in markets as a meeting point for citizens. And another thing that fascinates me about cities are trams: as children, in summer, we would go by tram from our house in Sants to Barceloneta, to see the sea; the memory of those journeys on the open-top tram is one of the most wonderful I keep.
---Did you already feel like a foreigner then, as you say you feel now?
--I believe that the place where one is born is just a starting point, it means nothing more than the point from which to seek where to develop. I have spent my whole life searching for that place, and this has allowed me to get to know an infinite number of cultures, in front of which to ask myself who I am, where I am going; eternal questions that always return and that are the essence of art. The journey is an attitude, it is not about going very far in distance but in your head, I always told my students at the School of Fine Arts in Paris. Or as the director of the Tel Aviv Museum once told me, regarding Petrarch and travel: "Jaume, try to always be a foreigner." This does not mean feeling uncomfortable in the places where you are, but a way of permanently questioning your position in life and, on the contrary, feeling comfortable wherever you are. We all need to find our sea where we can merge. Look, I can't swim, I don't float, and only when they took me to the Dead Sea did I understand that I had never been in the right sea.
---Do you mean that there you found your sea, your place?
---Not exactly, I mean that the journey is life itself, that it doesn't matter where you arrive. Perhaps it is more important where you can return. We have spent years buying one-way tickets, and now we need a return one.
(At this point, Plensa is overcome by a melancholic feeling that is not accidental. He tells me that this very morning, at this very hour, one of his high school teachers is being buried, a private funeral that he has not been able to attend. That old high school (Jaume Plensa Suñé, Barcelona, August 23, 1955) that children started at 10 years old. "She was my math teacher from the age of 11 until the end; and I always failed, I was bad with numbers, but she was my great friend, and she remained so until now. The death of a loved one closes aspects of your life and this cycle is what I call a journey").
---Even in your own land do you feel like a foreigner? Why do you say that you have stopped feeling Barcelona as your own, the city where you were born and grew up as a man and as an artist?
---I have stopped caring, because it's useless, there's no way. It's a very harsh city with its children. Picasso, Miró, Tàpies tried, and there was no way: it's a difficult city.
---Have you felt in any way obliged to donate your work to Hospital Clínic and Sant Joan de Déu, to cede it to the Palau de la Música?
---Nooo, I've done it gladly: I feel very flattered when I'm asked for something. I've developed my career mainly in the United States and things aren't like that there: there's always private capital that supports the artist. The Chicago fountain, for example, was paid for by a private individual, and many other of my works in public spaces. Here, something like that has to be done by the artist themselves, because there's no patronage law, nothing invites private capital to participate in society. Politics distrusts private interest and in turn is afraid of making mistakes, afraid of the ballot box, and therefore doesn't take risks. Julia is my first important work in a public space in this country, and it has been possible thanks to a private individual, Cristina Masaveu, who proposed that the empty pedestal in Madrid's Colón square be used as a temporary exhibition platform, which would change every year. But Julia is already in its third year, and it's a project that has gone through three municipal corporations of different political leanings, which makes me extraordinarily happy, because the usual thing is for politicians to have abandoned the idea of service to the citizen, it even seems quite the opposite. And so there is a lack of art in the daily life of the streets, cities, public museums and collections: it is forgotten that art, culture in general, is food for the soul.
---Plensa, what do you see when you look in the mirror?
---(Laughs, somewhat flustered) I don't know, but it surely won't be who I am. For starters, I'm reversed. I don't know how to answer you, I'm so used to the image it returns to me…
---Returning to poetry, you maintain that the poet is the soul of a society, who listens to them?
---Society sometimes doesn't even realize it, that's why I admire so much the poet's fidelity to people who don't even know they exist. But their voice gradually permeates until things germinate. The poet is admirable as a concept, they are of enormous generosity, and it is a very hard profession.
---And also, that words define people and communities. Let's play with words, which one would define the current state of affairs?
---BEWILDERMENT.
---Plensa, why do the faces you sculpt close their eyes?
---It happened in 2004, when I was working at Chicago's Crown Fountain. I made about 1,000 portraits of people, which is the landscape of every city. And when I had what I needed for my project, I decided to continue making portraits, of young women, because they represent the past and the future, with their very ephemeral beauty. That's why I decided that from then on I would sculpt them with their eyes closed, because it's the interior that interests me, the emotions we don't show. A portrait with closed eyes is a mirror for the viewer to reflect on what lies within.
---But why women and why young women?
---It has to do with the desire to make the ephemeral eternal. Between the ages of 10 and 18, women go through an enormous physical, visual transition, which interests me greatly. I scan their faces at 10 years old and at 18 they no longer look anything alike. In my portraits, there is a fusion of opposites, of ephemeral photography and eternal sculpture. I take a photo of a person who immediately is no longer there, is no longer what they were, and by fixing them in a material, bronze, stone, wood, glass, I eternalize them. The result has the strange effect of a hologram.
---Is that why they seem to have movement?
---When I scan a head, the anatomical information I get is so exact that when it's transferred to sculpture, it results in a verism we're not used to. It's so real it seems unreal. That's what gives that certain transparency to the sculpture.
---Transparency and silence: he has long captured silence in his works. And now, do you think looking inward, during this time of pause, is serving us for something? Do you notice that people have changed for the better?
---Again, it's too early to tell. I don't like to think that we're going to return to the same mistakes and that this will have served no purpose. Human beings are positive, always hoping for something good from any experience; and they are very imperfect beings who aspire to perfection. One of my works (Glückauf?, 2004) reproduces 30 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and when you read them, you realize that we practice absolutely nothing of what is said there, which is like a poem of good intentions to be better: social balance, avoidance of pain, pursuit of beauty... But we achieve none of it.
---Plensa, forgetting or the plasticity of memory is a gift that can save us. Will we also forget all this or transform it in our memory as a long nightmare?
---Absolutely. We have the right to construct our own past. It's even poetically beautiful. Our obsession is to have experiences that are pleasant as memories, and if not, we sweeten that memory over time. I have known people who have had a very wild life, who have been true beasts, and when they reach old age they seem sweet and kind. Why? Because it would be impossible for them to live with that memory. That's why it's important to write History, because if we relied on our memory, the pages would be blank: it's very painful to think of the barbarities that human beings have committed. When I was young, I had a good friend 40 years older than me, and when he was about to turn 70, I asked him: "If you think about your life, what conclusion do you draw?" And he told me: "It hasn't been perfect, but it hasn't been bad." Now that I'm approaching that age, I think a lot about that. As an artist, you cannot erase the errors of your work, you have to assume them and let each work be an attempt to transform error into virtue; it is one of the essences of art.
---And you, what conclusion do you draw? How has your life been so far?
---It hasn't been bad (we laugh).
---What would be that error that you have been transforming into sculpture?
---A work is never perfect, and that is precisely what compels you to start another; that is, all your work is based on error, because if not, you wouldn't do the next one. And the work functions when you assume the error and want to transform it into virtue. This is a beautiful reflection of the imperfection of people. As a human being, I am very imperfect, my life is full of errors, but thanks to my work, I don't need a psychiatrist.