The present drawings form a response to the artist’s 2018 Invisibles installation organized by Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. In the Madrid exhibition, three monumental portraits made in steel mesh were suspended from the ceiling of the museum’s Palacio de Cristal, a remarkable glass and steel conservatory built in the nineteenth century in the city’s Parque de El Retiro. Although immense by measure of volume, the portraits glimmered in and out of perceptibility, appearing and disappearing based on each viewer’s perspective and overall creating a sense of movement and environment that extended beyond the wire mesh. Indeed, the monumental portraits appeared in the Palacio de Cristal not just as faces, but almost as if entire bodies could arise from the steel skeleton of the structure. As Plensa tells it, “The things around us, the people, the objects, are sleeping like children who suddenly fall asleep in a car. Sculpture, creation, has this enormous capacity for waking us up again.”[iii]

The artist’s Invisibles drawings beckon viewers to a related yet still distinct sense of awe. While the trio of monumental figures invoked wonder in throngs of visitors meandering through the Palacio de Cristal’s grand hall, these works on paper evoke a humanistic closeness, a hushed one-to-one interaction drawn from the hand of the artist to the eye of each observer. In describing Plensa’s sculptures, Paris-based art critic Catherine Millet writes, “the materials from which they are made tend to ‘dematerialize’ through different processes… Everything is done so that the mass… becomes an intangible weight."[v] Whereas the mesh sculptures achieved this sense of weightlessness by floating from the ceiling above their viewers, the Invisibles drawings reverse this dynamic: they are rendered from a view looking down on each figure and thereby transmit that same sense of buoyancy back onto the observer. The drawings position viewers as if they are hovering above, inviting them to witness the weaving together of features into faces that remain abstracted and unfinished. This vantage point floating above the figures provides a perspective that substitutes the creator with the observer, situating them to see the warps and wefts of these figures as they draw together, or perhaps, come apart.

This awareness of transience continuously draws Plensa back to drawing from sculpture. In both mediums, he searches for the invisible, and working on paper allows him to deal with the evanescence of memory directly: “Sculpture is, I think, the relationship between the material and the immaterial. It is what creates a bridge between our tangible humanity and our intangible spirit.  A good image of sculpture would be when you try to hold water in your hands and it runs away between your fingers."[viii] Suspended between materializing and disintegrating, Plensa’s Invisibles distill a sense of soulful grace in faces that remain forever in formation. Elusive and unfinished, these faces serve as reminders that creation is never complete.