Page 51 - Fernando Sinaga. Ideas K

In the eighties his work was placed in the category of what came to be called “minimalist poetic” productions. Their utility—together with their other peer, conceptual art—was an interesting outlet for a generation of Spanish artists born in a political environment in which the reception of modernism was subject to a good many distortions and various anachronisms. In the absence of an avant-garde tradition, minimalism appeared to perform the lifesaving task of a lighthouse at sea. At the time those poetic works (impure minimalisms) served to bridge the gap between a broken down modernity and a new postmodern state characterised by the advent of the information society but, in addition, recourse to these formalising lines made possible another type of distancing: a shift away from the most subjectivist expres- sionism—or where decoration and ornament represent precisely any fictional element that should be suppressed—thereby highlighting the analytical and cognitive nature of works. However, the presence of minimalist features in the art of the period cannot be achieved solely by following the instruction manual—self-referentialism, seriality, industrialism—and this led to a whole aesthetic “poetic” invading the terrain of sculpture. “New” work was there- fore minimalist, or constructivist, and at the same time it was not; specific objects corrupted by the impregnation and overflowing of their contents. The question that arises retrospectively is: why would anyone want to base themselves on constructivism, suprematism or minimalism if it were not because what needs to be borrowed from them can only be used for
another cause? Is minimalism not like a simple research into its own limits, somewhat doomed to formalism? Rather, the poetry that emanated from that catalogue of forms was the tool for communication, and therein lay
the secret: the poetic of the avant-garde aesthetics was not the surplus
but the very condition that allowed the work of art to develop into a social event as such. More than an approach to minimalism, what Sinaga and his contemporaries seemed to evidence was a distancing themselves a little further still from all of that. However, minimalism also signified structure
or system, method even. The surface of Sinaga’s sculptures contains their meaning through absence; this flat surface of his work on which the gaze rests is a web of latent meanings waiting to be released through reading, that is, experience. The holistic capability of a simple structure lies in that very negation, for the more reductionist it seems in form, the less it is in content, or the more laden it is in the latter. The complexity of the gaze at
the world, his wish for “totality” can only be contained, as he says, in that “amalgamating”; the work of art is a channel for the inclusion of all the non-art contents possible (philosophy, thought, sociology, science and alchemy and the like), only to show that art is no more than the empty recep-
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