Putrefactio (Putrefaction)

Fernando Sinaga studied in Barcelona, Madrid, Zurich and the United States and is the author of highly personal works. In 1989, he participated in the 20th São Paulo International Biennial with a monographic exhibition conceptually linked to post-Minimalism, in which sculpture was conceived as space and boundary. His influences include the philosopher Rudolf Steiner, who, according to the artist, helped to shape his Goethean view of the world, which we could define as ethical and spiritual individualism, also present in the work of Joseph Beuys.
Putrefactio deals with the transmutation of matter in reference to hermetic science and alchemy, disciplines in European Baroque knowledge in which material creation and spiritual being were intertwined as one and the same thing. The work unfolds stratigraphically on the wall, in an ‘invisible symmetry’ that ‘establishes order and measure in the visible’ to express a rhythm of perfection. The large wooden panels burned by caustic soda at the top create a monochrome surface that, according to the artist, ‘gives greater vividness and intensity to that idea of decay associated with death and transformation’, while ‘the photograph of the transparent glass [...] refers to the old alchemical vessels and the notion of emptiness

Carmen Fernández Aparicio