Angel Orensanz Foundation presents rePROJECTIONS
ANGEL ORENSANZ BY LUIS BUNUEL
“Only my imagination can create the images, the words, the rhythm, the movement that I am looking for. I never go to the cinema to see my films… neither anyone’s film. Right now, people in Paris are besieging me with projects of four or five films. They have the money, they have everything but I will not do anything. I think something like this occurred to Orensanz. As he is a real artist, his personal stories come in and out of his artistic topics in sculptures, drawings, potteries, concretes, metals and paintings with waves and cataracts. In these, I can see a swirl of visions in constant change asking to go back to the initial material. Real artists move on alone, make their way alone and create alone.”
ANGEL ORENSANZ AND LUIS BUNUEL – rePROJECTIONS BY FRANK GERARD GODLEWSKI, CURATOR
“The installation RePROJECTIONS features works of Angel Orensanz and Luis Buñuel, revealing the dialogue and relations between both artists. Sculptor Angel Orensanz reinterprets and reconfigures images and moods from his experiences with Luis Buñuel, also from the Aragón region of Spain. Orensanz, in the manor of Buñuel, uses the surrealist compositional language to transform his New York studio into a scientific theater to create a surrealist landscape where dream, reality and visual memory are reenacted through films and videos. The surrealist landscape is characterized by elements of surprise, metaphysical juxtapositions, and a philosophical expression of revolution. Surrealism developed within literature, Visual Arts, cinema and music as a theoretical and political gesture of writers and artists. They believed that excessive rational thought and bourgeois values led the world to war. According to them, in Surrealism, the ideas of regular expressions and depictions are vital and important, but their reality must be open to the entire range of the imagination in the Hegelian dialectic. Hegel developed a comprehensive philosophical framework, or “system”, in the relationships of mind and nature, subject and object, knowledge, psychology, status, history, art, religion and philosophy. In particular, he developed a concept of mind or spirit that manifests in a series of contradictions and oppositions that ultimately integrated and united, without ignoring the elements origins or reducing one to the other. Examples of such contradictions are those between nature and freedom. Freedom and the development of methods for unlocking the imagination were of the great importance to the Surrealists. The surrealist act of juxtaposing disparate elements within the same field results in consequential effects of surprise, and liberation of the imagination. Since the early 1970’s Angel Orensanz has developed a prolific body of work including performances, conceptual art and video. Educated in Barcelona and Paris, he opened his studio in New York in the1980’s after having worked with several architects like Marcel Breuer, Martin Gelber and John Portman. He has developed his environmental installations at locations like Holland Park, London; the Red Square in Moscow; Roppongi-Park and Senso-ji Temple in Tokyo; the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, and the ABC Playground (Houston St.) in New York.”
DR. AL ORENSANZ ABOUT ANGEL ORENSANZ
“Angel Orensanz has developed an extensive body of work in sculpture, drawings, installations (Holland Park, London), conceptual work (The Shattered Tent) and multimedia work. His work conveys the corrosive tempo of the surrealist and Dadaist revolutions (Thomas McEvilley and Carlo MacCormick) that explains the frequent reference to Luis Buñuel in his work. The first international review of the video work of Orensanz took place last summer (1980) and fall in Venice, concurrent with the 30th Biennale of Venice. For six months, the show “Burning Universe” at Palazzo Malipiero in the heart of Venice was visited by some 80,000 people who made it one of the popular exhibitions. “ Burning Universe” ran parallel to a presentation of a large sculpture piece, an homage of Angel Orensanz to Buñuel titled “Razor in the Eye” in Lido, in the context of the 50th Venice Film Festival. For the last 18 years, this institution in the heart of Lower Manhattan, has been bringing back to life a stunning piece of architecture, arguably the best remnant of the 19th century German legacy in America; and has been fostering intellectual, artistic, spiritual and educational growth to tens of thousands of people from all over.”
DANIEL GIRALT-MIRACLE “ARTE EN LA AUTOPISTA”, FUNDACION ALBERTIS, BARCELONA, 2007
“Orensanz spends a lot of his time traveling throughout the world… The mission of the artist is to convert the emotional, which is like perfume or wind, into art. He narrates with enthusiasm how the architect John Portman commissioned him to build six very tall pieces… That commission brought to Orensanz, in 1985, a very substantial amount of money and he was able to acquire one of the most emblematic buildings of New York. He was looking for a studio in Manhattan, and somebody spoke to him about an old synagogue, in disuse and in the hands of a greedy developer. He restored it slowly without finishing it at once, with the help of artists who exhibited in the space and with the monies of the rental of the space for lectures, parties and events. Some celebrities that passed through the building contributed as well to the project. As the artist recounts it: the day I went to see the building for sale, I looked through the keyhole and saw the pigeons flying under the dome inspired by the Cathedral of Cologne. Picasso’s doves fired his inspiration; it was like a prophecy. ”
For more information please visit:
http://www.beaconpass.com/event/reprojections
http://www.nycgo.com/index.cfm?event=view.eventdetails&id=252373
The Angel Orensanz Foundation 
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