Seville 1974

The work of Pilar Sáenz (Seville, 1974) moves between the strictest mathematics and the most personal poetry. Her sculptures in rusted iron -one of her favourite materials, though not the only one- are dominated by straight lines, clean profiles and geometric forms, an aesthetic deeply influenced by the modular architecture of Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, as well as by the Minimalist sculptural current.

But the key to Sáenz’s work lies not in the form: it lies in the void. The sculptor relinquishes the possession and instinctive use of the void in order to regain it through the painstaking formula of experience. Pilar knows that the body of her sculpture immediately alters the void it inhabits, and this leads her to conceive her work as an organism that transforms voids. That conception leads her to organise and order the void (which, once organised and ordered, becomes hers) within her own work. What lies between one zone and another, between nothingness and the sculptural mass, belongs to the sensory dimension, not the numerical one. And indeed every hollow in her sculptures, every space through which the air moves freely, is an existential void. The Sevillian artist draws on her own experiences to generate her works, breathing life into that cold, objective geometry. Each cavity speaks to us of the absence of a person, the insubstantiality of life, a rupture or a displacement -all of them concerns of the contemporary individual. And it is precisely here that Pilar sets herself apart from her two main references, Chillida and Oteiza, foremost representatives of a prehistoric Basque language.
Sáenz’s work, made in rusted iron -a material considered predominantly masculine-, manages to convey a very contemporary feminine sensibility, labyrinthine and complex. The most interesting part is that, despite telling us so much, despite speaking so intimately of her concerns, her works still invite us to reflective contemplation, to a spiritual pause. .

Pilar Sáenz’s work is therefore profoundly dual: Where form meets emotion. Matter as a territory of identity, memory and transformation. between sculptural void and mass; between the feminine and the masculine; between the knot of conflict and the flow of energy… There is in it an acceptance of opposites, a mature and even Eastern attitude