Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, I’m tired of this sterile circus around contemporary art! If you’ve visited a big city in recent years, you’ve surely come across one of these oversized heads by Jaume Plensa. You know, those oblong faces of young girls with closed eyes, emerging from the ground like dreamlike apparitions, white and smooth like cosmic eggs. They are everywhere: Chicago, New York, Montreal, Jerusalem, Rio, Calgary, Antibes… Like Starbucks or Zara stores, impossible to escape. Globalization has found its sculptural champion.
But what lies behind this peaceful invasion of meditative faces? Why is the whole world clamoring for these monumental sculptures that challenge our perception? And how did Plensa go from being a gallery artist to an international star of public art? I’ve spent years watching his work evolve, and I must admit: beneath the apparent formal simplicity of his creations lies a conceptual depth that deserves our attention.
As a critic, I’ve always been wary of artists who achieve such meteoric commercial success. When everyone is in awe, I look for the flaw. When mayors and billionaires are lining up to commission a work, I smell conformism. But with Plensa, it’s different. His work possesses that rare quality of being able to satisfy the crowds while maintaining true artistic integrity.
What strikes me first about Plensa is his ability to transform public space into a place of collective contemplation. In a world saturated with screens and notifications, his sculptures invite us to slow down, breathe, and reconnect with our inner silence. Take the “Crown Fountain” in Chicago (2004), that interactive installation where a thousand faces of ordinary citizens appear on two 15-meter-tall glass towers, periodically spitting water like high-tech gargoyles. Plensa’s genius lies in having transformed an anonymous urban space into a contemporary agora, where children play in the water while adults contemplate these monumental faces. Public art is no longer a mere urban ornament but becomes the catalyst for a true communal experience.
This social and political dimension of Plensa’s work leads us to explore his relationship with architecture, the first theme I wish to delve into. For if architecture traditionally dominates the urban space, Plensa manages to create a poetic counterpoint to this monumentality. As he explains himself: “Works of art are like a small David facing a gigantic architectural Goliath” [1]. In our contemporary world, the true monuments have become architectural; they are the skyscrapers, shopping centers, and airports that define the urban landscape. In this context, the artist no longer has to commemorate, that’s what architects do, but to humanize the space, to give it back a human scale.
In Calgary, his work “Wonderland” (2012) brilliantly dialogues with the immense The Bow tower designed by Norman Foster. Facing this giant of glass and steel, Plensa installed a 12-meter-tall wire head that visitors can walk through. “I was not the least bit interested in the relationship with the scale of the building,” says the artist. “I wanted a relationship with the people” [2]. This sculpture thus becomes a poetic refuge that protects “the little ants that we have become around these gigantic buildings that crush us” [3]. Art resumes its primary role: giving people the tools to feel human again in an environment that overwhelms them.
Contemporary architecture has lost its essential function of embracing the human, of creating spaces on our scale. The interchangeable glass buildings that make up our skylines have become profit machines, symbols of corporate power rather than places to live. In the face of this dehumanization, Plensa’s sculptures appear as acts of gentle resistance, reintroducing the intimate into public space. When he installs “Julia” (2018) on the Plaza de Colon in Madrid, the artist claims to have “introduced the concept of tenderness” into this inhospitable place. A notion that might seem absurd in public space, but that radically transforms our experience of the city.
This tension between monumentality and intimacy is found throughout Plensa’s work. His monumental sculptures do not seek to crush us with their size, but to create spaces for recollection in the heart of urban chaos. Unlike Richard Serra, whose steel structures dominate and disorient the viewer, Plensa’s creations envelop us, invite us to contemplation. As art historian Peter Murray points out, “Plensa is a very interesting artist because he is firmly anchored in the conceptual camp, but the manufacture of the works is also very important” [4]. He is neither a pure conceptualist nor a simple formalist, but an artist who understands the power of material to convey ideas.
Let’s now turn to the second theme I want to explore: literature, which deeply permeates Plensa’s work. The artist does not hide his love for words and texts. His father was a great reader, and he himself defines as a lover of poetry. “Shakespeare is the best definition of sculpture,” he says, quoting the soliloquy “Sleep no more” from Macbeth. “You are always working with physical elements. You touch, touch always. But you cannot describe it” [5]. This impossibility of describing the sculptural experience joins the poetic quest to say the unsayable.
Letters and words are omnipresent in Plensa’s work. His human figures made of intertwined alphabets, like “Nomade” (2010) in Antibes or “Source” (2017) in Montreal, are true body-texts, carnal envelopes made of linguistic signs. For Plensa, letters are like biological cells that need each other to communicate, to create words, to invent languages, and to shape cultures. It is no coincidence that he uses alphabets from multiple languages (Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Japanese, Cyrillic, Hindi) in his sculptures. These alphabets become the bricks of a universal language, transcending cultural barriers.
In “Gluckauf?” (2004), Plensa uses the text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which he considers “one of the most beautiful poems of all time” [6]. The suspended metallic letters clash to produce aleatory music, transforming these founding words into a fragile and moving symphony. The installation is only complete when the spectator engages with it, makes the letters resonate, becomes an active interpreter of this “universal poem”. Literature is no longer just a text to be read, but a complete sensory experience, tactile and sonorous.
This fusion between literature and sculpture evokes the concept of the “total book” dreamed of by Stéphane Mallarmé, where the physical dimension of the text, its layout, its typography become as important as its semantic content. Mallarmé saw the book as a “spiritual instrument”, capable of transforming the reader through an experience that is both intellectual and sensual. Plensa’s sculpture-texts function in a similar way: they invite us to physically inhabit language, to literally enter into words. “Words are the bricks with which thought is built”, explains the artist [7].
This materialization of literature finds its apogee in installations where Plensa creates “poetic shelters” that the visitor can enter. On Ogijima, a small Japanese island, his “Ogijima’s Soul” (2010) is a pavilion covered in alphabets from around the world where villagers gather every evening. The structure, reflected in the water, symbolically forms a hut, a homage to the sea as a bridge between all cultures. Literature is no longer confined to books but becomes architecture, habitable space, a place of community gathering.
The figure of the American poet William Blake also haunts Plensa’s work. His installation “Rumor” (1998) is directly inspired by the verses of “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” by Blake: “The cistern contains, the fountain overflows” and “A thought fills immensity”. A drop of water falls regularly on a bronze plate, sonically materializing these verses. Blake, a poet-engraver who integrated text and image in his “illuminated books”, shares with Plensa this desire to create a total work that engages all the senses. Both seek to make the invisible visible, to give form to ideas, to create bridges between the material and the spiritual.
This literary dimension is found even in the monumental portraits that have made Plensa world-famous. These stretched heads with closed eyes are like blank pages on which everyone can project their own dreams and thoughts. They embody what the artist calls “the poetry of silence”, a meditative state where the noise of the world fades to make way for our inner voice. For “Echo” (2011), installed at Madison Square Park in New York, Plensa was directly inspired by the nymph of Greek mythology, condemned by Zeus to repeat the words of others. “Many times we speak and speak”, explains the artist, “but we are not sure if we are speaking with our own words or simply repeating messages that are in the air” [8].
This is where all the ambiguity of Plensa’s work resides. On one hand, his sculptures embody a form of humanist universalism, celebrating what unites us beyond cultural differences. On the other, they question our ability to think for ourselves in a world saturated with information. Are we still able to hear our own voice? When he installs “Water’s Soul” (2021) facing Manhattan, this gigantic white head with a finger to its lips, he is not asking the city to be silent, but invites us to be silent to better hear “the sound of water”, that nature we have forgotten in favor of urban modernity.
One could easily dismiss these works as mere New Age totems, Instagram-friendly sculptures meant to be photographed by tourists. But that would be missing their true power. In our culture of hypervisibility and constant noise, these faces with closed eyes remind us of the importance of withdrawal, of introspection. Faced with technological acceleration and generalized surveillance, closing one’s eyes becomes a political act, a form of passive resistance.
Plensa’s work also raises essential questions about the function of public art today. How to create works that speak to everyone without falling into facility or consensus? How to transform urban space into a place of shared aesthetic experience? At a time when so much public art seems mediocre or decorative, Plensa achieves this feat: creating accessible works that retain their conceptual power.
Certainly, one can criticize the repetition of certain formulas. These heads of preteen girls sometimes seem too wise, too polite to truly challenge our perception. One can also question the systematic choice of pre-adolescent female subjects, which raises issues in our hyper-aware era of gender and representation. Plensa justifies this choice by invoking “a Mediterranean tradition in which girls and women are the bearers of memory” [9], but this explanation sometimes seems a bit short in the face of contemporary issues.
Nevertheless, we must recognize in Plensa this rare quality: he has found an immediately identifiable sculptural language while maintaining real conceptual depth. His works function on several levels: they seduce visually while opening spaces for philosophical reflection on our relationship with language, with public space, with ourselves.
The paradox of Plensa is to have become a global artist by celebrating precisely what escapes globalization: interiority, silence, contemplation. His monumental heads are like counterweights to the acceleration of the world, islands of slowness in the continuous flow of images and information. They remind us that true globalization is not that of goods or technologies, but that of dreams and human aspirations.
I remain convinced that Plensa is one of the rare contemporary sculptors to have found a balance between accessibility and complexity, between formal beauty and conceptual commitment. In a world saturated with cynical and self-referential art, his works dare to speak of hope, communion, transcendence. And if some see naivety in this, I see courage: the courage to create an art that sincerely seeks to unite us rather than divide us.
So yes, you bunch of snobs, I affirm it: Jaume Plensa is one of the most important sculptors of our time, not despite his public success, but because of his ability to make this success a vector of meaning and beauty. In an often elitist and hermetic artistic landscape, his works remind us that art can still bring us together, move us collectively, make us look up to something that transcends us. And that is perhaps, ultimately, the greatest feat: creating a truly democratic art without ever sacrificing its singular vision.
- Interview with Jaume Plensa, Barcelona Metropolis, 2017.
- Words collected by Ted C. Fishman, “At the Threshold of Forgotten Dreams: A Visit with Jaume Plensa”, New City, 2023.
- Interview with Jaume Plensa, Barcelona Metropolis, 2017.
- Peter Murray, executive director of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, quoted in “Monuments: The Poetry of Dreams”, The New York Times, 2011.
- Jaume Plensa, quoted in “Monuments: The Poetry of Dreams”, The New York Times, 2011.
- Interview with Jaume Plensa, Bonart, 2023.
- Jaume Plensa, quoted in “Discover Jaume Plensa Through 6 Iconic Pieces of Art”, Artika Books, 2020.
- Jaume Plensa, quoted in “Monuments: The Poetry of Dreams”, The New York Times, 2011.
- Words collected by Ted C. Fishman, “At the Threshold of Forgotten Dreams: A Visit with Jaume Plensa”, New City, 2023.
