TATLIN NEWS #47

ОБЛАЧНАЯ ТЕКСТУРА |

Чэтсуорс,

| Jaume Plensa |House of

Великобритания

| текст Сергей Ковалевский

Knowledge | фото sotheby`s

CLOUD TEXTURE | Chatsworth, Great Brit- ain | Jaume Plensa | House of Knowledge | photo by Sotheby’s | text by Sergey Ko- valevsky For third year in a row Chatsworth estate in Devonshire serves as a platform of modern art presentation organized by Sotheby’s. Amond two dozens impressive works loosely placed on the grass podium of the duke’s estate the an- thropomorphic cloud by Spain’s Jaume Plensa stands out. This open-work giant was first shown on the World EXPO in Saragosa dedicated to water and was named El Alma del Ebro. The trans- parent shell from guipure made of letters ini- tially contained the ‘soul of the Ebro river’. But then as a real Proteus the cell structure from the Pirenees changed the name and appeared on English lawn in September titled House of Knowledge. Even though this is a replica that is three meters smaller than the original, but in the sense and context it seems an almost more

effective statement. Dialectics of the artificial and the natural is perceived more distinctively in the floral mass of lawns and forests. The let- ters quiver in one frequency with the murmur of the leaves and the green noise beats in one elegant rhythm with the white noise. Sitting on a beautiful hill nursing his knees the ephemeral spectator inspires by lyrical and monumental force at the same time. The an- imate intellectual mirage looks as a worthy version of Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’. As a true adept of modern art, demonstra- tively balancing on the edge of verbal-concep- tual and cisual-plastic art, Plensa fused and bolted together a relaxing ‘figure of speech’ from Latin alphabet. What is word here and what is image? It’s useless to try and read the message written on the sculpture: there is no grammatical order here. The cloud that sat down to relax on the grass does not read or write, but creates a feeling of the word in the mind of the beholder. The role of syntax is

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