After a long-standing career in France and in England, Orensanz developed a personal visual language that combined imaginative audacity with technical rigour, putting them both to work in series of pieces conceived to add a magical dimension to the human space.

His sculpture wishes to act as memory and also as a form of judgment. It challenges the vision and questions reason in order to give everybody a wake-up call, to cultivate the memory, because the future lies in wait with all the weight that history has deposited over us.

Orensanz’s works humanise nature in pieces that are inserted in the public space in order to give it life, creating an environment in which each element takes on its own value in relation with all other surrounding elements. They call for wide open spaces; for an environment in which his ascending totemic figures full of openings finally take on meaning; this forest of polychrome tubular elements.

The artist explained this work and its title in the following terms:

“A sculpture for a specific architectural and social context. A plastic presence that endows the whole surrounding environs with an aesthetic dimension. An integrated sculpture. As thematic elements, the references, from left to right, are Jaime Balmes y Urpiá (1810-1848), Antoni Gaudí (1852-1926), Jacinto Verdaguer (1845-1902), Joan Maragall Gorina (1860-1911) and Juli González Pellicer (1876-1942). Behind them, the countless projections of their work in a multitude of personalities, many of them anonymous. And their predecessors too: Muntaner and Ausiàs March and also contemporaries like Monturiol and José María Sert. In short, the confluence of the past and the present, of outstanding characters and anonymous silhouettes of emigrants: the depiction of a people.”

The work pays tribute to the Catalan spirit and people; to its work and its eagerness to better itself. It is homage to a multicultural amalgam formed by a people whose only recognisable faces are of its emblematic figures, but in which all its other members are equally present through faceless silhouettes.