Fernando Sinaga, an artist born in Zaragoza and established in Salamanca, developed his artistic career between Spain and Germany, and within the great sculptural movement that has taken the national and international art world in full swing from the 60’s to the 90’s. His work emerges from one of the defining fields of poetical exploration in the visual arts during the second half ofthe 1960s is the consideration of perception and its processes as motifs in themselves, something that produced, and still produces today, major ramifications.
Sinaga mines this domain with remarkable subtlety, to this end relying mostly on colour and perceptive displacements. That said, we should also underscore that, treated as a process, this perceptive poetics opens up the material boundaries of the works, redefining them as an interference with the audiences. Additionally, the “open” approach posits the experience of sculpture as a mental operation engaging with thought rather than understanding.
However, in contrast with the “serialisation” and asepsis proper to minimalism, Sinaga’s work adopts a position that we could regard as naturalistic to the extent that, in using minimal counterpoints and appropriate supports, he attempts to trigger complex irreversible processes of perceptual concatenation. Nothing is left to chance. Rather it is predicated on an infinitesimal interdependence characteristic of natural processes. As a consequence, in Sinaga’s practice, the interactive openness to audiences is combined with the naturalistic tone of the minute variation to give shape to a manifest landscape of interiors allied to architecture, in which colour often not only activates composition, but defines it in open planes from an interplay of correspondences between spaces and forms.
Ideas K, the survey of Fernando Sinaga’s work at the MUSAC, overviews the symbolic, geometric, optical, material and chromatic imaginary undergirding the artist’s practice from El Desayuno Alemán (1984) right up to his most recent work. The idea behind Ideas K is to underscore the specific and experimental nature of Sinaga’s work as well as its transversal and diversified thrust, as revealed by the compelling correlation of the connections and links running through his practice over the last 26 years.
The project vindicates artist’s independent temperament while showcasing the wealth and complexity of his work. In Sinaga’s creative practice, crossing boundaries involves much more than a simple interactivity between the works, whether objects or images. More to the point, it involves an appreciation of space as a visual and plastic element rather than a neutral container of creations. Likewise it entails considering art more as an aesthetic experience in which one takes part than as a distanced contemplation.
Covering an area of over 600 m2, MUSAC’s exhibition hall 2 will deploy, on one hand, a body of work largely consisting of photographic and audiovisual pieces by Sinaga, accompanied by works on paper that will act as a common thread running through the parcours, punctuated in turn by several small cabinets.
About Fernando Sinaga’s work
One of the defining fields of poetical exploration in the visual arts during the second half of the 1960s is the consideration of perception and its processes as motifs in themselves, something that produced, and still produces today, major ramifications. Fernando Sinaga mines this domain with remarkable subtlety, to this end relying mostly on colour and perceptive displacements. That said, we should also underscore that, treated as a process, this perceptive poetics opens up the material boundaries of the works, redefining them as an interference with the audiences. Additionally, the “open” approach posits the experience of sculpture as a mental operation engaging with thought rather than understanding.
In Sinaga, the notions of interactive perception and creation also entail another, though directly related, feature that places him at the forefront of his generation. In contrast with the “serialisation” and asepsis proper to minimalism, Sinaga adopts a position that we could regard as naturalistic to the extent that, in using minimal counterpoints and appropriate supports, he attempts to trigger complex irreversible processes of perceptual concatenation. Nothing is left to chance. Rather it is predicated on an infinitesimal interdependence characteristic of natural processes. As a consequence, in Sinaga’s practice, the interactive openness to audiences is combined with the naturalistic tone of the minute variation to give shape to a manifest landscape of interiors allied to architecture, in which colour often not only activates composition, but defines it in open planes from an interplay of correspondences between spaces and forms.
