Literature has always been a source of inspiration for Jaume Plensa. As the artist states, “I have a group of poet friends who, although they have not particularly influenced me through their work as a whole, have touched me deeply with a specific piece of their work“.
But this literary influence is not limited to the artist’s readings, it also extends to the letters themselves which he uses to create his sculptures. Plensa began with the Latin alphabet and gradually incorporated other alphabets such as Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Greek, Cyrillic, Korean and Hindi. For Plensa, each letter has a unique beauty, but all together they are a sign of the diversity of the world and the coexistence of different cultures. As the artist explains, “a letter doesn’t look like anything, it’s a humble thing, but combined with others it forms words, and words form texts and texts, thoughts. It’s a bit like the idea of the foundation stone, around which the temple is built, then the city, the country, the continent and the universe“.
When he was commissioned by Hortensia Herrero to carry out an intervention in the apse of the former Palacio Valeriola, now the Art Centre, Jaume Plensa turned to this world of letters to produce, for the first time, an installation which takes over a space that the artist has dubbed the navel of that centre. So he created a second skin on the wall with his letters from various alphabets, through which he aims to show the diversity that exists in the world.
