Page 47 - Fernando Sinaga. Ideas K

Contradiction, Negation and Totality in Fernando Sinaga Peio Aguirre
Keep watch over absent meaning. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster.
Viewing a retrospective of Fernando Sinaga’s work today is like going back in the tunnel of time to a period in which the term “sculpture”
still had symbolic—if not openly psychological—connotations that the evolution of a referentialist and historicist post-modernism has ended
up neutralising. Is it still possible, amid the excess of information and cutting-edge artistic metapractices, to cling to sculpture as a last resort? Sculpture, that of Sinaga being more two- than three-dimensional, is the bearer of a quality that has become extinct nowadays, when it may seem plausible to proclaim the demise of sculpture as a particular and hyper- specific territory. This “loss” (of sculpture) to which I refer has nothing
to do with the three-dimensional or spatial aspect in itself, as objects continue to be produced in large quantities. This absent sculpture which nevertheless lingers on in Sinaga is more related to a dimension that is ontological and also phenomenological and spiritual, in which art is a process of inner knowledge of the subject. I should point out that the
loss of sculpture as such should not be a reason for mourning, just as it
is necessary to clarify that the post-modernism I have in mind is more an inevitable condition than a particular style or manner, and what needs to be done now is an arduous and difficult task—opposed in principle to the marks of postmodernism whatever they are—in clearly postmodern times. Within this frame of reference and in Sinaga’s own words, sculpture is like a “violent outburst”, an action or place from which you “feel yourself to be the receptacle of totality”. Insistence on a personal standpoint then catalyses into sculpture as a differentiated field: “Sculpture has thus progressively taken shape over the years in the final sensitive experi- ence of everything that has been unknown and hidden to me, and also a manner of uniting thought, feeling and will in an inner unity”.1 But perhaps sculpture needs no lawyers to defend it and it so happens that Sinaga, who trained as a painter and who refers constantly to the pictorial space with two surfaces, is not so interested in the mythology of the sculptor
or in anything that recalls the logic of the monument; to him, matter does not yield to disciplinary preconceptions and his approach arises from
the condensation of the gaze falling on the surface (which is first and foremost matter) into a sort of posture he shares with a certain conceptual painting. Sculpture without sculpture. Neither painter nor traditional sculp- tor, matter and immateriality at once (in an unending process of dissolu- tions and solidifications). Are they perhaps variants of specific objects?
1. Fernando Sinaga, “Ûzuluz”,
Consideraciones discontinuas y otras conversaciones, Salamanca: Domus Artium 2002, 2006, p. 56
All the quotations from the artist in this text are taken from the aforementioned Conversaciones discontinuas, a compilation of the artist’s writings and interviews between 1985 and 2005.
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