by Robert C. Morgan

The other night, I attended a lecture at a prestigious art school in New York where the speaker rejected the notion of ecstasy in art as being anti-political. He went on to say that ecstasy in art offends the prerequisite of the class struggle that is indelibly inscribed on the tablet of historical change. Later I disagreed that the role of art is meant to be political in the way he described. Yet we all know that art is subjected to what politicians say and do and to what ideologues hold forth. Even so, art is finally above all that. To find an alternative to the morass of politics and ideologies, art must discover something that touches the soul of human beings in a way that raises consciousness above these recalcitrant effects. If ecstasy is one way to make this happen, then why not? This, I believe, is something that Angel Orensanz instinctively feels. Each time I have seen his work, I am amazed at his rigorously intuitive, yet delicate manner. By this, I mean he consciously avoids disdain through the passion of discovery, through a Kierkegardian leap into the ethos of Non-Being.

I have long argued that art comes at us from an oblique angle. It is not a phenomenon that we address through direct confrontation. If that were the case, we would lose the subtlety of art, the poetry by which art becomes a pleasurable experience. The content would get obscured the way the commercial media obscures our sensory and intellectual view of reality. One may discuss the rationale of art in terms of the irrational as did the Dada artists many decades ago or, for that matter, the Fluxus artists at the outset of the sixties. Art cannot be only literal and direct. It needs an oblique angle of vision, the material metaphor -- and this is precisely what Angel Orensanz gives us. His forms and environments, his quixotic resolutions and dissolutions, are about reverberations of birth and destruction at a simultaneous instant. His art is ironically about the big bang of the universe -- the life-death syndrome – where the birth of something fantastic appears in the process of disintegrating. This is related to French Symbolism, to Abstract Expressionism, to Caravaggio and El Greco, to the poetry of the Beat generation -- Ginsberg, Corso, Kerouac, Joans, Micheline, and to the distinguished Russian poet, Andre Voznesensky.

Here I must digress, and recall from my youthful days the occasion on which I heard Voznesensky read at Harvard University in the Spring of 1966. Saunders Auditorium was packed that night – no seats available, only standing room. The poet came on stage with his translator and began to read. The format for the evening was that Voznesensky would recite a poem and then the translator would follow in English. As the evening wore on, the pitch of emotion in the audience began to build. The poet was definitely in tune with the audience as the audience was clearly in tune with him. I recall at least five encores in which Voznesensky was called back on stage, and on each occasion, he would follow the format by reading in Russian, followed by the English translation.

Finally, by the sixth encore, the momentum of the audience had reached a point of utter delirium. People continued clapping and stomping their feet until Voznesensky finally appeared again, looking slightly bewildered by the extraordinary response he was being given. Soon, the translator appeared behind him whereupon the audience made it clear that they did not want to hear the poems read in English. They only wanted to hear the sound of Russian, the poet’s mother-tongue. Voznesensky stood alone on stage at Saunders Auditorium and recited “I am Goya” in Russian. The audience would not allow him to leave. As he continued to recite, the overwhelming emotion was felt in his voice. After twenty minutes, Voznesensky raised his hand to say farewell, whereupon the audience stood up en masse. The poet left the stage with a thunderous applause. I had the distinct impression that this was an historical event, and that the pivot of history was moving. The “cold war” was beginning to disappear from the face of the Earth.

That evening afforded me an important lesson -- something that all true poets and artists must eventually learn. Whether one has suffered the misguided interpretations of Communism, late Capitalism, or postmodernism, the reality of art transcends all barriers. Culture is not about precluding difference, but about embracing it -- at all costs. In the work of Angel Orensanz I sense a similar spirit, an inward-seeking gregariousness, a way of searching-out the truth in a world that has lost all contact with mystery, with the soul of the poetry, with the aspiration to go beyond the routines of existence and to enter into the spiritual and poetic embodiment of Non-Being. For it is within the realm of Non-Being, according to the Tao Te Ching, that we discover the essence of Being. After experiencing the work of Orensanz one cannot help but ask: What is the reason for existence if not to reach the heights of our sensory and intellectual capacities, to mold these two aspects of living into a single holistic vision of who we are, and thus, to define the direction of future life?

Angel Orensanz is a hybrid personality, a true multiculturalist. Coming from French and Spanish origins, Orensanz has traveled for most of his entire adult life, moving from one country to another, from one place to another, always confronting new languages and customs, always managing to discover a likeness of mind in other people with whom he shares a sensitivity and for whom he dedicates his work. In this sense, Orensanz epitomizes a spirit of generosity in his art. He is not concerned with the abstract machinations of the art market. He removes himself from these concerns. To sell art is an incidental aftereffect, a necessity that happens only when new materials have to be obtained for new projects, or when travel, accommodations, and sustenance are needed.

Angel Orensanz arrived in New York in 1986. Eventually, he and his brother, Al, found an old temple in the Lower East Side. This would become Angel’s studio and show space, his sanctuary and meditation space, his space for happenings, projections of films and videos, a dark space, a space of eternal light sanctioned to uphold the nomadic artist’s need to emit an infinite creative energy. The pursuit of extending a creative force into the world through attention to nature has become a lifelong commitment. His drawings reveal the source of his ideas. The activity of drawing and photography become constant sources for exposing the artist’s intimate ideas. In the words of Orensanz, his art constitutes “a second language from the reality.” He works close to nature, using tree branches filled with objects, wheels, colored scrims, and muslin discs that hover like poetic interventions in space. His use of materials become “fantasy objects” that exist without a functional context, ready-mades taken from everyday places that are suddenly transformed into a garden of heavenly delights. The feeling of a Bosch phantasmagoria is not so far removed from the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic maneuvers of Orensanz. He dares to exploit the commonplace and to give a new redolence to these objects, mixing and remixing parts, giving them a new alien presence.

As with the famous Dogalypse poems by Voznesensky (translated into English in the seventies), Orensanz is perpetually shedding his skin, showing us the truth of the human soul through the metaphor of the body. The “second language” of the artist is also a second skin, a way of wearing a mask that shields reality in order to reveal the farce of the commonplace, the irony of the intellect as it strives to apply obsolete precepts and dogmas to human life, dogmas that make no sense in terms of how life is lived on our planet today.

On some level, I have to agree with this need for romantic liberation and for the nomadic way of life that Orensanz tries to pursue. In many ways, he has a sensory and intellectual force in the wake of art’s disintegration through marketing. I cannot entirely disagree with his position. Somehow I find that his objects and events, his intuition, his interpersonal contact with others, offers a necessary force, a kind of momentum that represents art not as an extension of media, but that reveals all media to be an extension of art. Orensanz works at the core of his intuition; therefore, whatever medium or materials are necessary to use, he applies them to a new context that further incites new combinations, variations, and permutations. He has the knack for discovering new ways to make things work, all matter of things. Incidental objects, that others may see as detritus, suddenly take on a magnanimous lyrical significance, another reality that escapes into the stratosphere of his “second language.” He is an artist within the realm of nature and the natural, an artist who will not give up or subside into the meandering of technological rhetoric. In this sense, theoretical postmodernism is not his point of view.

In recent years, I have experienced two environments by Orensanz and one construction. The first environment (I use this word to describe his work in that the artist does not agree with the term ‘installation’) was an exhibition mounted in the mezzanine of the temple that houses the Orensanz Foundation. The second was in the Palazzo Malipiero across from the Palazzo Grassi where Angel created a magical sequence of rooms filled with projections, objects, and natural artifacts in a dingy space as part of the Biennale di Venezia in 2003. His sculptural construction was done for a small plaza near the vapporetto stop on the island of Lido outside of Venezia. In each case, Angel’s works held a quality of fragmentation that appears to recoil and then suddenly emit a sense of order previously unrealized. Orensanz enjoys the moving image -- time past -- in relation to time present, an enfolding of temporality within the constraints of an architectural space where other objects, materials, photographs drawings, and branches are strewn or placed in a very deliberate manner. Orensanz’s manner of working suggests a statement made by the American painter Jackson Pollock who claimed to be in control of every pour of the paint that soaked into his large canvases. What Pollock meant, of course, was that control happens when the excitation does not exceed the rhythm. Rather the rhythm takes its own course, and the artist is clearly with that course. One can say that Angel Orensanz is a creator of space, a maker of a vital space, an elan vital. In fact, there is a kind of Dada mannerism in all of this. Yet one cannot deny the deliberateness of the artist’s intuition as things are placed in a relational position to one another, thus arriving at some weirdly understated, if not bizarre formalism, a kind of totality that is not at all about coherence, but about the layering of fragmented or deceased forms still seething with vitality, from of the edge of life.

This brings us to the metaphorical title of this exhibition of Angel’s exhibition at the Alexander Pushkin Museum in Moscow and at the Russian Museum at Rumsantyev Palace in St. Petersburg: “Earth: Death-Birth” One does not need to speculate on the meaning, because it is here in the work of Orensanz. The freedom to interpret meaning is here in the tactile resonance of the forms -- the discs floating through the branches of trees, the pigments in the snow, the perennial plastic sphere of Orensanz: the translucent globe, the playful form that has become his signature in time, indeed, in all earthly matters. With Orensanz, play is everything -- as it was with Picasso, Masson, Rodchenko, and Miro. Man the player -- homo ludeus -- is the beginning of all serious art. The figurative drawings, the contorted beings that sifting through their time on Earth, beings that linger in the light, collaborate with the recent photographs of “furrow sculpture” on the plains of Spain, askew aerial views of linear configurations, reminiscent of the great Nasca line drawings in Peru, or the sensual ankle bracelets worn by elusive Brahmin lovers carved into the stones of Kanarak.

For Orensanz, art is about the state of the Earth at any moment, at this moment, the evolution and the entropy, the swirling magic of the galaxies found in the heavenly lights: the stars that are constantly dying or being reborn at every second, through nanoseconds, centuries, and millennia. Orensanz sees the particular in the general, and the general in the particular. Like a Taoist monk who stares into the heavens, then looks down at a single blade of grass, Orensanz is there within time and space. His art exists within the stratosphere of untimely logic. His structure is filled with the resurrection of Non-Being, the sanctuary of the body, the endless cycles of fading out and fading in, of dying and being reborn. This is method and the goal of Angel Orensanz: to be an artist or not at all.

Robert C. Morgan is an international art critic, curator, artist, poet, and lecturer. He holds an MFA in Sculpture and a Ph.D. in contemporary art history. He is the author of some 1500 essays and reviews and is translated into a dozen languages. His books include Art into Ideas (Cambridge, 1996The End of the Art World (Allworth, 1998), Gary Hill (Johns Hopkins, 2000), Bruce Nauman (John Hopkins, 2002), and Vasarely (Braziller, 2004). He writes for Artnews (NY), Art Press (Paris), and is Contributing Editor for Tema Celeste (Milan) and Sculpture. Among the many exhibitions he has organized and curated are Komar and Melamid: A Retrospective (Ulrich Museum of Art, 1979) and was co-curator of the Lodz Biennial (2004). He was the recipient of the 1999 Arcale award for art criticism in Salamanca, Spain.