[dropcap letter="D"]
Two seemingly identical gongs, face to face, with distinct inscriptions in the center of each: "Matter" and "Spirit". The viewer is invited to strike them, and participate in a growing vibration, being affected themselves. Alongside the immaterial aspect that seems to derive from matter, the specular character of the work suggests the opposite possibility, that some kind of spiritual foundation underlies matter. The title of this work, created in 2005, poses it as a dilemma, but we do not know if the slash that relates the terms matter/spirit links or divides them. The connection, or correlation of both realities is to a certain extent indiscernible, as all reality is constituted for human beings in their conjunction, at the limit that separates and unites, as Eugenio Trías, one of the first intellectuals I heard speak of Jaume Plensa, used to tell us some 15 years ago.
The success of the exhibition that Macba has dedicated to the Barcelona sculptor, and which can be visited until April 22, is by no means accidental. His deeply humanistic concerns challenge the viewer and lead them to review the meaning of what is unconsciously believed. In the era of mindfulness, the function of art is still crucial. It represents an anchor in the most proper present, which refuses to merely caress consciences. Art opens questions about the meaning of the work and the viewer in relation to it, avoiding taking for granted the understanding of its purpose. Its relevance is paramount. Plensa modestly expresses it in a presentation video: "I have said it many times, art is useless, that's why it is so important...".
Such "uselessness" frees art from the need to render accounts. It would seem to place the creator in the position of the jester, of one who, joking, probing, playing—that is, by parabolic means, always as an approximation or essay—dares to formulate what, said directly—said seriously—would be intolerable and perhaps even incomprehensible. Before Friedrich Nietzsche formulated the need to conceive of play as a very serious task, determining one's own life, Friedrich Schiller had already written in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, in the last years of the 18th century: "Man only plays when he is man in the full sense of the word, and he is only entirely man when he plays. This assertion, which at this moment may seem paradoxical, will attain a wide and deep significance once we have applied it to the double seriousness of duty and destiny. Upon this assertion, I assure you, will be founded the entire edifice of aesthetic art and of the even more difficult art of living." The mysterious threads of necessity—ananke, for the Greeks—intertwine with the free action of man, in the form of an intensely lived understanding.
While Immanuel Kant had warned that aesthetic experience was not a source of knowledge, the subsequent generation of thinkers—among whom Schiller, "father" of Idealism according to Rüdiger Safranski—understood that it opened the possibility of transcending the physical world to rise Platonically in the conception of ideas. Whether this transcendence is understood metaphysically, or in a much plainer and more down-to-earth sense, the point is that the space-time inaugurated in the contemplation of pieces like Plensa's positions the spectator at the center of the game board, with no other reference than their own gaze, confronted with the question. What does that string of metallic letters hanging jocosely and implacably mean, which turn on themselves and disrupt the delineated meaning with a random tinkling, a sound always new but which one would say programmed by some cosmic force alien to human reason?
Jaume Plensa enhances the search for answers, from the original -and necessary- recognition of one's own ignorance. The effort to decipher a hidden message in his work Glückauf?, from 2004, will reveal the inherent difficulty in applying what the text says. It is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, approved by the United Nations in 1948. The most natural thing -the provision of inalienable rights from birth- is shown to be intricate, indecipherable, and with it, reflection is urgently posed. The perplexity aroused by this work -with a title, "good luck?", more playful and challenging than cynical, like the enigma launched by the jester- arises from the mysteriousness of its mobile reality. It seems to reflect the constant, or at least potential, disruption of human reason. The free and equal nature in rights of living beings can be believed to be understandable by every rational being -Kant would speak of the reciprocity that this implies, in moral terms- but in any case, it is confirmed to be difficult to respect and care for, in certain circumstances.
For, how to maintain the genuine universality of moral principles, and jump over those circumstances, understandable as "obstacles of human nature" in the words of the sage of Königsberg? Art, like philosophy, in many cases allows to denounce, point out contradictions, raise questions, rather than provide clear and distinct answers. A fact that distances it from science. And, nevertheless, it possesses a language, some characters. Those, hanging, are not the only ones that the spectator discovers in the Macba exhibition. The dizzying fall is re-encountered in the adjoining room: words like "father" and "mother" hang from effigies of orphans anchored to the wall, parallel to the floor. Another of the moments -this time of calm- in which vocabulary delineates a truth that alternates materiality and immateriality takes us outside, to a kind of garden. Trees appear embraced by several identical sculptures -they are faces of the artist himself, closed in on himself- in a vegetal embrace, with names of rivers and classical composers inscribed on their bodies.
In reality, these are two works, composed of cast metal figures, that interact specularly: The Heart of Trees (2007) and The Heart of Rivers (2016). The flow of melodies that the characters allude to, with distant or related harmonies -like rivers with "ever-different waters," Heraclitus would say- allows the viewer to rest, and to see from the outside the introspection of another, which could be oneself. The transport, the leap above the material requires matter, and although mathematics intervenes -the Pythagoreans knew this- the magical, mysterious character inherent in the act of feeling oneself as another and at the same time absolutely united, fused with being, is also invoked. This self-absorption can be contemplated in the work Carmela -a precious and monumental metallic face in front of the Palau de la Música Catalana- as well as in the series of faces closed in on themselves -in the Macba exhibition, wood carvings- that seem to warn of the inscrutable nature of the person.
That closedness and the inexhaustible range of nuances in each personality deeply move, which in the case of Plensa's work is manifested by the surprise that wood provides when worked. Unforeseen nuances that trace from maximum randomness the path of the necessary, as Schiller pointed out, making the interpreter or spectator also participate in that transcendental path, in that fusion with destiny. To be one with the fluctuating course of time, to assume the presence of the unrepeatable -however inscrutable it may be- does not represent a creed or some type of postmodern spirituality. From ancient Greece to Nietzschean thought, which inseminates 20th-century art, the longing that Jaume Plensa embodies has episodically manifested itself. More than a theoretical discourse, the humanistic vindication of his art concerns universal and concrete concerns. In a colloquial tone, he conveys a truth of great transcendence: "the basis of art is to delve very, very, very deeply into your roots. The deeper I go into myself, the more I will be able to speak of you, because we will meet at this very deep base."