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Art from the abyss

Jordi Montaner | 24 may 2010

Exhibition: Perspectivas ocultas (Hidden Perspectives)
Sculptor: Xavier Sis
Headquarters: Fundació Pons
(Pasaje Méndez Vigo, 2, Barcelona)

The abstract sculptor Xavier Sis (Lleida, Spain) has planted in gallery of the Pons Fundació in Barcelona a collection of sculptures that incorporate electronic light as a conceptual innovation that grants them a larger-than-life appearance. Sis never fails to leave the visitor indifferent. He is an experimental artist, and, this time, he plunges us into the depths of a dark ocean where light is nothing but a trap of form, a vital gesture designed to attract prey or confuse predators.

Sis's art takes us far offshore and deep beneath the bathypelagic zone, thousands of meters below the surface of the water.

The unfathomably abysses of the ocean are home to science fiction-like fauna whose monstrous appearance is hidden by the sorcery of the deep. This benthic fauna is made for cold environments, under enormous hydrostatic pressure and the total absence of sunlight. It is a wasteland devoid of plant life, where every form of nutrition is a treasure extracted from the chemosynthesis performed by bacterial species. Strange fish, huge crabs, polyps and isopods, large glassy sponges, sea lilies, sessile of primitive form are each hinted at in the form of a few sculptures.

The inventory of the creatures of the deep totals more than17,000 species, but Sis’s abstract shapes hold just a handful. Mesopelagic beings gain three-dimensional form that the light reduces and divides. It is a source of biodiversity the human being have just discovered, fascinated for decades by the tropospheric glow and without noticing the lights coming from the bottom of the sea, ignoring the fact that both worlds have lights and related forms.

Sis says: “The impulse of artistic creation comes from the will to find referents, personal stabilizers to fill in the disturbing and challenging spaces of the exterior world, exhausted by the arbitrariness of perceptions.” The artist’s abstractions push the bounds of geometry, relativize mental preconceptions, exude artistic perception and suggest the beauty that lies beyond our terrestrial scope.

Space, Sis writes, “is the permanent enemy of abstraction.” The light that impregnates his sculptures completely breaks the third dimension, the concept of depth. Severed edges give simple forms to objects floating in nothingness that come to life as iconic poems. “Nothingness is still a continent in itself,” also in the solitude of the deep ocean, where stone, wood, metal and electronic light conspire to send the observer's imagination to dream of an almost inaccessible world, in which remote control devices have brought to light unknown beings, strangers, it seems that from another galaxy, which in reality can claim this planet as their home as much as we can.
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