Tel Aviv Man XVI is a superb example of Jaume Plensa’s investigation into the complexities of the human experience. Renowned for his monumental sculptures and public installations, Plensa uses letters to explore communication between individuals and cultures. The striking Tel Aviv Man XVI is a paragon of Plensa’s marriage of letters with the human form. Composed of a “skin” of letters from the Latin alphabet, Plensa’s figure analogizes letters as the fundamental component of language and culture, capable of being infinitely rearranged and recorded to communicate across generations. With its faceless figure, the present work represents both everyone and no one, poetically expressing the universal elements of the human experience.
“One letter alone is nothing. But together with other letters you get a word. A word with a word becomes a text, and so on. A person alone is nothing, but together with others we become family, a neighborhood, a city, a county, a country.”
—Jaume Plensa
Of his work with iron, Plensa has recounted: “I was dreaming about the moment when the mountains were formed, the moment when everything was liquid and hot and suddenly started to cool, solidify, and take shape. For me, there’s a mythical element in the way fire transforms things into liquid. Something solid becomes liquid and then becomes an object again.” Executed in the metal, Tel Aviv Man XVI is paradoxically industrial and ethereal: the elemental metal contrasts with its lattice-like construction. Suspended from a thin wire, the work appears as if floating mid-air in an exquisite, spiritual experience.
