Oriol Rius - Utopia

ORIOL RIUS - July 2001

A park for a sculpture, a sculpture for a park.
The space rejected by the promoters, in the back of the houses, lanky and uneven... that’s what was left to the Park.
¿Can two curves vertebrate an invertebrate space?
The sculpture needed a park to catch air. And the park, a sculpture to gravitate around it.
But how to decipher the circle and square encrypted in the curves, without the long carpet of the park?
And how to discover these angles? So different without their slopes
With Photoshop I removed the houses in the background. Over the years, they will be removed by the trees.
Meanwhile, captivated by squaring the circle, we are almost blocked out from the environment.
And we are bewitched, contemplating the game of curves.
Or asking ourselves:

Alternative power point presentation

This work was originally conceived for Camp de la Bota. On the wall there was an evocation of the impact of the shootings, and the title of the work was "The Last Look: The Sea (To Icaria)", by alluding to the utopian socialists of that cabetian community that was established near that site decades before the shootings. It was presented for the first time in the exhibition “Imaginary Seas” in 1996 at Hospital del Mar.

Since then, I called Utopia these two curves that seem to defy the impossible squaring the circle. These curves occurred to me when I went to the house of Bellcaire d’Empordà months before, while I was thinking about a cube.

Strolling along the beaches of Poble Nou – where my workshop is placed – I associated them to the shootings of war and postwar respectively. Those hatreds could hardly be removed permanently; but with these two curves – the utopia of squaring the circle – it became somehow possible.

But the council of Esparreguera was who finally became really interested in this work, through sculptor colleagues of the group Espai Compartit. Esparreguera has always been a melting pot of utopian people and I am proud to be a part of it.


	The last look: the sea. Their eyes were covered and they no longer could see it. Silent witnesses – indelible notaries of the facts, still present at the place – curling up, gunned down.