Cantarem la Vida

The Catalan sculptor Apel.les Fenosa focusses attention on the flowering moment – his figures transfixed in clay give the illusion of unfurling. They emerge from the hollow form of leaves, or leafy foliations break like ruffled wings from women’s outstretched arms. The leaf woman, high as a man’s hand, takes many shapes. These delicate apparitions, lightly borne like a fine breeze on a stifling summer day, always show the trace of thumb and finger pression, of the conjuring hand that shocks them into life. Creatures of an instant, they stand in the cellar below the house at Vendrell; in the semi-dark they seem like a race of natural beings, flower-figures, figure-flowers, and echo the tremulous soaring notes of the oboe in old Catalan airs, cadences light as bird-song.