No Words Conversation
Radu Abraham
Plaza del Revellín
With the collaboration of Instituto Cultural Rumano
The concept behind the title comes in the idea of an invitation to a multi-layered dialogue or conversation. First layer comes from the relation between the installation and the point of the city where it is placed, with very specific history and aesthetic. In this context the proposal comes in contrast with the environment, managing to blend-in exactly through this contrast and even though it occupies and assimilates most of the square, it manages to keep a balanced composition with everything around and to create a visual conversation with the surroundings. In this matter, we can observe the relationship, intentionally punctuated in this way, between the artist’s proposal and the existing statue in Plaza Muralla del Revellín, these two being positioned on the same pedestal and this way having the premises of a first dialogue.
The proposal made for Concentrico comes as a dimensioning at the scale of a monument for a plastic language and a way of visual expression that Radu Abraham has in the realization of his objects. In this case, the object in question aims to achieve both a physical function through light and places to hang around, but also wants to achieve a social one, in the form of an installation that attracts and invites the public to come in contact with it, an installation that surprises through its form in relation with the function, creating this way a context conducive to dialogue.
On a more subtle layer, the idea of a dialogue or a conversation is also made as a reference to the cross-section approach that Radu often has on this work.
Like many of his previous work located somewhere between object design and sculpture, the proposed installation has the object as a start, approached from an aesthetic point of view somehow detached from function and more close to sculpture and scaled up to the dimensions of an architectural intervention. Hence it has properties from all these creative fields aiming to remove a clear delimitation between them. It can be viewed as an affirmation of the way they articulate and influence each other, becoming an object of dialogue in itself.