Epojé [Fernando Sinaga, 1989 - 2024]

The Fernando Pradilla Gallery presents in its galleries the fourth exhibition by Fernando Sinaga (Zaragoza, 1951). In this new project -named Epojé and specifically conceived for our space as a continuity of his three previous presentations: The end of the world [L'origine du monde]. ZKT; Pánta Rei and El libro de las suertes y los cambios - we find a Sinaga who, in an extraordinary tour de force, unfolds before the observer all the complexity of his poetics.

In an act of communication with the public, the artist shares with them not only his sculptural pieces but also his reflections on art and aesthetics. “Art belongs to everyone, not just to a privileged part of society. It is, or should be, a contemplative experience that puts all our faculties to work, something that activates thought and feeling, through which our knowledge of the world grows.” F.S.

Epojé is anchored around a philosophical concept raised by Sextus Empiricus, physician and philosopher of the 2nd century A.D. who, in his Pyrrhonian Sketches, defines the position of the skeptical school regarding the knowledge of the world. The epoché would correspond to an aesthetic and vital position by which neither the nature of things is affirmed nor denied, but only their perception in relation to the individual. The skeptic would be, literally, the one who dedicates himself to observe without clinging to any form of thought.

The history of philosophy and knowledge is once again the pillar on which Sinaga's work is based. Before it was Heraclitus in Pánta Rei and before that the I-Ching in the exhibition The Book of Lots and Changes. “Art is one of the motivations of philosophy, since in its constitution lives an enigmatic structure of a consciousness that delves into the unintelligible. Epojé represents the transformation of that consciousness, an arrested observation and a parenthesis of the gaze.” F.S.

In this sense, and intending to illustrate this idea, the exhibition consists of a selection of sculptural pieces dated between 1989 and 2024 whose nexus, as in all of Sinaga's work, is the attempt to generate signifiers of a philosophical nature.
Fernando Sinaga belongs to the generation of sculptors that emerged in the eighties in Spain whose work is linked to concerns about the phenomenology of art, perception and the spectator's experience as part of his aesthetic discourse. Time and space are essential categories in the conception of his works along with chance and destiny.

In his sculptural work the textual is intertwined with the rigor of his material and formal research. Sinaga has published his Escritos sobre arte 1999-2016, at CENDEAC, Murcia, and his writings and interviews at the Domus Artium in Salamanca on the occasion of his exhibition Zona. Likewise, Fernando Sinaga is one of the Spanish artists who has most reflected on public art, carrying out different institutional projects such as Pantallas espectrales sobre el Ebro on the occasion of the International Exposition of Zaragoza in 2008 or El escalofrío retiniano for the City of Arts and Sciences of Valencia in 2000. His sculptural work has been the subject of major exhibitions such as La estancia inhóspita, IVAM, 2005, and Ideas K, MUSAC, 2012, and his work is represented in the collections of major Spanish and international public and private institutions such as MNCARS, IVAM and the Kunstsammlung der Ruhr-Universität in Bochum, Germany.