Page 29 - Fernando Sinaga. Ideas K

GM Your work took shape in a period dominated by the reductionism of minimal- ism, but there is a powerful component of expressive multidimensionality and emphasised formal complexity in it. What relationship do you have with minimalism?
FS My work does not spring from minimalism, as can be seen when examining the works from 1976 to 1984; this is even fairly evident in the exhibition El desayuno alemán (The German Breakfast) (1986), which is a phase that does not belong to that influence either. The work produced from Los estados preconscientes (Preconscious States) (1986) onwards, however, appears to fall under its influence owing to its extremely reductive character, but if you look more carefully at the stages in the oeuvre produced between 1986 and 1989 (São Paulo Biennale), it is a group of works in which formlessness and its influence were already part of the initial conception, though of course this work is the closest to minimalist influence. Therefore, the period of Untitled, which is so characteristic of minimalism, is a period that has not been studied much, although I still believe that this work is closer to post-minimalist hetero- doxy than to the orthodoxy of the primary structures of minimalism. It was from 1996 onwards that the Agua Amarga (Bitter Water) and Solve et Coagula projects took shape and evidenced more clearly my divergences with the most orthodox American minimalism. Furthermore, I have stated on various occasions that learning from minimalism has been essential to my work, as
it has provided me with a valuable linguistic structure for reconsidering my work, but I don’t have the phenomenological, spatial and physical character of minimalism, nor do I possess the literality of its language, as other hidden realities underlie my work and that is deeply anti-minimalist. The psychic, the subjective, the biographical, the illusory and the narrative are the circula- tion of the blood that has driven much of my work and, indeed, I have never attempted to establish a radical break with the past, as certain minimalist artists aimed to. Memory and individual and collective archetypes coexist in my work with it.
GM Works like La construcción de la esquina (Construction of the Corner) (1999) and Deuteroscopia (Deuteroscopy) (2009), among others, indicate your inter- est in the frontier of architecture. How did this closeness come about?
FS The work Deuteroscopia, as shown at the MUSAC in León, explained a central part of the exhibition architecture of the project Ideas K, as the meeting place between two planes. It is a work that sprang up by adapting itself to space and ended up becoming the reverse of La construcción de la esquina (1999). They are no doubt complementary works, as they are shaped from the very
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