Photos: Carlos A. Schwartz – Efraín Pintos

Islas (Islands)

Islands (1995) is a set of 73 black aluminium, methacrylate and neon boxes suspended by steel cables from tree branches. What is striking is the contrast produced firstly between the dense and chaotic foliage of nature and the regular boxes with a random placement, but within an order. At the same time, the work can have two interpretations depending on the time of day (from the point of view of the sun’s illumination). In natural light, the unlit boxes seem almost phantasmagorical objects, they become entities suspended in time or space and can be confused with tree branches, but at night with their own lighting, which allows us to read the text contained in each box, they take on another meaning, the names take us back to beings who have lived very close to our contemporary world and who, by means of opposition to the names themselves, we can partly contemplate in a subjective way what the world of art has been during the whole of the twentieth century. This produces a true symbiosis between art and public space.

Plensa constructs his own mental universe from an idea that is supported by another and so on until it triggers new forms. In this sense, the artist explains his work: as an artist one must generate something much more important than the work itself, a new attitude towards things. In writing the wonderful phrase “One thought fills immensity”, Blake defined sculpture not as a physical way of filling space, but as a source of energy, of vibration, emanating from things expanding in space.

Retrieved from COA of Tenerife, La Gomera and El Hierro – Culture – Street Sculptures (I and II edition): https://www.coactfe.org/esculturas-en-calle-primera-edicion/jaume-plensa-islas