Page 19 - Fernando Sinaga. Ideas K

The Essence of Art Is Freedom of Thought and Action Interview with Fernando Sinaga by Gloria Moure
GLORIA MOURE To start off with, there are a few aspects of your work that I would like to clarify. For example, you always refer to yourself as a sculptor, yet the questions raised in many of the works are essentially pictorial: the surface, the inseparability of matter and image, configurations from the perspective of a perceptive journey,...
FERNANDO SINAGA My initial academic training was in the field of painting and this learning has forced me to develop a practice that was subject only to what was going on inside a blank canvas, a two-dimensional space where it was necessary to introduce an action that required a visual distance to enable me to distinguish how to carry on progressing. That is, in painting I found a way of learning how to construct image, something I could do from start to finish, so that I was able to gain a certain creative autonomy through this experience. Practicing painting also gave me a certain immaterial vision of reality and a lightness that I would later use in the field of sculpture. This experience as a painter helped me develop a type of visuality that would reinforce my idea of a markedly divergent type of sculpture.
GM Owing to the nature of the materials employed, part of your works change according to the viewpoint or intensity of light, as they require external factors to complete their final configuration. To what extent is perception worked on as one of these materials?
FS The first time I visited Lissitzsky’s Abstract Cabinet I realised that my relation- ship with space needed to develop a certain amount of confusion between genres. It was 1985, and back then I already had a certain amount of experi- ence as an artist; I had finished studying painting and sculpture ten years earlier; I had exhibition experience; and I had lived in the United States, where I had studied modern and contemporary sculpture in depth. It was with Lissitzky that I realised the importance of this confluence of disciplines, and it was in this work in the Sprengel Museum in Hanover where I saw how space had become the ultimate objective. Design, painting, sculpture and image were part of the architecture and furniture. This blend of artistic practices changed my view of art and sculpture.
Lissitzky had created perceptive confusion by introducing the spectator’s movement as an essential ingredient for activating space and form. The plastic reality was optical and changing and nothing was static any more. Painting had joined forces with sculpture to create a modification of space. At that moment my creative dilemma seemed to have found an answer and I could therefore find an outlet for my innumerable contradictions and diver-
[19]