Fernando Sinaga

Exhibition

Fernando Sinaga is, without doubt, one of the most prestigious Spanish sculptors, with important exhibitions in national and international galleries to his name., having realised referential exhibition projects such as Agua amarga (Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, Parma de Mallorca, 1996), Doble inverso (Palacio de los Condes de Gabia, Granada, 1998) Anamnesis (Palacio de Revillagigedo, Gijón, 1999) and Esculturas 1991-1999 (Sala Amárica, Vitoria, 1999). He has represented Spain in the São Paolo Biennal (1989) and in the Spanish Pavillion of the Universal Exhibition of Hannover (2000). In the IVAM Institut Valencià d’Art Modern presents his series of Polaroids in which he explores ideas of shadows, vanitas, death, the portrait and, in short, the flash that reveals the real. Together with these photographic instants are arranged a selection of sculptures that also integrate, together with the magmatic, the detained image and another, titled Contramundum (2002), in which he refers to the baroque and to the idea of a playful circuit. The title of the show, The uncanny stanza, refers as much to the way of living in relation to the essential as to the Freudian determination of what is familiar-strange. If the subject is, in the experience of the sublime, an impotent witness, he may also, from the artistic dimension, try to shed light on something which is purely amorphous. After all, the work of art is, also, uncanny, that strange place where we may linger. Sinaga knows that a delay has occurred, an apostrophe before death that ends by revealing that the miraculous is always found in everyday life. The worst cannot be avoided, it is necessary to grasp life, but after having passed through destruction. Sinaga’s mortal dreamworks are directed towards the unknown, towards latent ideas, but also towards pleasure. Remembering that pleasure is only a kind of amazement, a dazzling, a fragmentary flash in a mirror, just as a gift is the arrival of the new, of the unexpectable and of the unrepeatable. What can be transmitted in the symbolic exchange is always as much absence as presence, it helps us to maintain that kind of fundamental alternation that makes possible appearance in one point, disappearance and reappearance in another. The rest is the sign of absence. We are destined to the uncanny, we have to accept the fragile game of chance involved, like a shadow, in the image: “dispossessed of the world, I disappear” writes Julia Kristeva.