Jaume Plensa at the Center of Contemporary Art

The Spanish artist Jaume Plensa is perhaps best known in the U.S. for his popular Crown Fountain, a monumental public sculpture inaugurated last year in Chicago, which combines digital sophistication with an engaging urban exuberance. "Engaging" is a word applicable to much of Plensa's work, which typically seizes on more than one of the spectator's senses, with tactile or sonic elements enlisting the ears as well as the eyes, or inviting one to explore forms and textures directly. This both undermines the usual distance between viewers and works of art and offers imaginative opportunities beyond an exclusively esthetic response.

This became especially clear when a dozen of his latest works (most are from the last two years) went on display recently in several galleries at Malaga's spacious Center of Contemporary Art. More than sculptures intended to contextualize or grapple with the space they occupy, Plensa's poetic objects provoke first puzzlement, then fascination. Most of the pieces here seemed to harbor philosophical or political ambitions. Words, in the form of literary citations, proper names or historical allusions, have always played a crucial role in Plensa's work. In the compelling Three Graces (2005), excerpts from a letter of protest about prison conditions in England penned by Oscar Wilde are painted sinuously along the curved bodies of three large kneeling figures cast in translucent polyester resin, lit from within, that jut out horizontally from their perch high up on a gallery wall. Their hunched posture, coupled with Wilde's cogent criticism, evoke recent images of bound prisoners in Iraqi prisons and in American POW camps.

Song of Songs (2005) again employs words: columns of individual cast-iron letters, each the size of a belt buckle, hang from the ceiling like row upon row of flypaper strips, uniformly linked and separated by clear filament. They spell out (in English) the first verses of the sensual Biblical text, creating a zone where the public can literally touch and be touched by the verses. The piece is at once elegantly abstract, self-contained and lyrical.

A kind of captivating, mysterious lyricism also characterizes Wispem, an in-progress installation that occupied its own room in Malaga. At present, the piece features 44 brass cymbals, each one suspended from the ceiling above a large copper bowl resting on the floor. Each cymbal (there will eventually be more than 70) is engraved with one of William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell." Water randomly drips onto the cymbals from above, creating an eerie tintinnabulation in the darkened space that evoked a Zenlike atmosphere redolent of contemplation.

Though primarily an account of just two fantastically creative years, this beautifully installed show had the impact of a mid-career retrospective. It effectively conveyed to the viewer the power and richness of Plensa's work.

--Terry Berne

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