Arte Público - Fundación César Manrique

ecause I do not believe that modernity, whose inception dates back to the
Enlightenment, has completed its cycle, but rather, in recent years, has shaped itself
into mere – although admittedly substantial – reflection.
It is true that to the Romantics, sculpture – through the Greek ideal of totality –
was a paradigm and that, in painting, the natural landscape constituted the great
metaphor of harmony, the object of their pursuit and dreams. These two ideals went
hand-in-hand with the sublimation of emotion, the advent of aesthetic criterion and
the acknowledgement of the contingency of the human condition. Nonetheless, as
any of us would readily realise, probably due to the persistence of theological and
progressive prejudice, Romanticism – as mannerism before it, for instance, and in
general, any age of precarious cognitive stability – was stigmatised with the label of
the transience that heralds future stable orders.
Indeed, the nineteenth century was, ultimately, characterised by absolute
scientism in everything and, what is more, by the isolated consideration of
everything. This happened because, far from associating things with their outward
appearance and location within a landscape (the prevailing principle of
representation until that time), the tendency was to relate them on the grounds of
their internal and objective structures. There was, instead of a single global object,
a whole world of objects (including the objects of art), each one answering to its
own objective evolutionary dynamic. This perspective disregarded the role of the
observer and the importance of the surroundings (or landscape) to a greater or
lesser extent and, as a logical consequence, totality of whatever kind was
fractionated and splintered. The outcome was that objectivity was reinforced by the
steadfast belief that nature was mechanistic, with no room for uncertainty or
probability, while the space reserved to opinion and, therefore, to poetry, gradually
shrank under the pressure of the preponderance of the discourse of rationalist
idealism (of one or another hue). The world seemed to be reduced to a system of
well-defined equations with constant parameters where, if one variable were
altered, it would be possible to predict accurately what would happen to the others.
Determinism permeated each and every discipline, language became an object with
autonomous rules, metaphysics seemed to wane relentlessly, philosophy was
converted into formal logic and history became a known and predictable argument,
structured in terms of its respective philosophy.
Nonetheless, although the above description of the nineteenth century may
seem derogatory in tone, the cognitive convulsion that the advent of objectivity
and the idea of internal structure (contradicting the principle of representation)
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