Great sculptors are often also great draughtsmen. In general, they are not keen on colour. For Plensa, drawing is a constant practice, a resource.
In the spring of 2023, Jaume Plensa designed the staging, costumes and sets for Verdi's "Macbeth" for the Liceu, Barcelona's opera house. The first drawings in this exhibition come from this project. The (sometimes illegible) text that the artist incorporates into his collage drawings comes from Shakespeare's play. One series of small portraits is entitled "Witches"; these are the three witches who foretell Macbeth's future.
For the next series, "Miroirs", the artist was inspired by a poem by Baudelaire, Les Litanies de Satan [Satan’s Litanies]: "Prince of exiles, exiled Prince who, wronged, yet rises ever stronger from defeat".
It is this text that runs around the figures caught in these mirrors.
Even when he is content to work on paper, the hand of the sculptor is never far away. He is constantly driven by the desire to give paper thickness by embossing, crumpling, gluing several sheets together and adding acrylic paint. Little by little, he gives body to his images.
