Page 33 - Fernando Sinaga. Ideas K

GM We decided to begin the retrospective at the MUSAC with El desayuno alemán (1985). Did this episode in some way mark a change in your way of working or in your attitude to your work?
FS Definitely. Its result is a reference for being able to understand my work. Though I owe this to you, as you put an effort into rescuing a phase of my work that was concealed to the present. This project enabled me to see the thread that linked nearly three decades of work; I recovered emotions and experienced that were lost; and managed to establish new links between the different works you had selected. I also saw how, despite the time that had passed, a formalisation as physical as it is visual had lived on since my begin- nings, a discontinuous continuity that had survived thanks to this exhibition. In a way I rescued part of my creativity by finding myself face to face with the present and realised how these works can coexist by turning space and time in their favour. There is no doubt that the reading I hitherto had of my work has been greatly enriched, for—as you are well aware—it was really difficult to situate projects that were intended for different spaces and time and see them together, confronted with their different scales. It was a highly positive experi- ence. Even the route we established for viewing the works stood up to the monumental space of the MUSAC. It was really exciting, as when you have decided to hold an exhibition like this one, you know perfectly that its staging is not going to give any respite, as putting it together beforehand causes you to face up to a self-analysis, a Freudian fort-da in which you recover every- thing you have lost in a single stroke.
GM Symmetry and measurement are a constant feature of your creativity, but don’t you think that, from the ideological point of view, these abstractions should be modified and that from now on we should get along with the lack of definition of a centre and with the relativity of any measurement?
FS Symmetry is not an issue that affects only geometrical abstraction or minimal- ism, although perhaps it is in these forms of representation that the bipolar structure of reality is best evidenced. In my view, certain artists’ tendency towards symmetry is a constructive part of their work, a reflection of the natural, as the symmetrical is an irremediable drive, an archetype, a pattern
of structure and conduct, and a model from which all the rest are derived.
In certain artists duplicity and the mirror effect are a linguistic device and a problem that is not only constructive but semantic or symbolic, and in others it is just the consequence of the very dynamics of construction. In my work, as in nature, nothing is perfectly symmetrical, as that would take us directly to the sphere or the cube. If we think of works like Separatio/Coniunctio we
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