Ivo Sans is a plastic artist and musician. He enjoys recognized prestige in the circle of experimental jazz, but his plastic artwork is practically unknown.
The work of Ivo Sans can be traced back to a central genealogy of contemporary Catalan art, an art of fragility and humility. With Tàpies as patriarch and Antoni Llena as main director, this is evident in other figures such as Joan Furriols or young artists who approach it from different angles, from irony to lyricism, such as David Bestué or Mar Arza. There is an ethnic belonging, political even, in the origins of Ivo Sans’s approach. Rather than opting for quantity and spectacle, of copious showy assertiveness to compete with other stimuli that invade our daily environment, the artist prefers to wait for a favourable moment in which beauty, interrogation or memory can emerge, with the minimum intervention. Art then becomes a kind of vestige, but also appears as a right, the right to silence, to reflection.
 
The performative intangibility of music may be linked to the conception of Ivo Sans’ sculpture, so close to dematerialization, held in place by a trace of paper. There is also a poetic dimension to lyrics which the artist holds onto, as it is a protected place for meditation, where intimate resonances emerge, echoes of intense experiences of the world, that specific language cannot master.
 
Marks on anything is a phrase that appears on one of Ivo Sans’ pieces and which serves as a starting point from where we can move nearer to his work. Marks on anything may be interpreted as “marks on any thing”. Anything may also mean “not nothing”. Indifference and absence meet half-way: everything and not-nothing are the two extremes of a same reality, which requires silence, care, and respect, in order to obtain some degree of truth from existence, from time or from our identity.
 
His approach aims to provide meaning from the most absolute simplicity. It is, therefore, a modest yet ambitious form of art, a simple ontology, only possible when the author has vanished from view, empowering the capacity to observe the slightest detail. The form, the space and the language flourish like signs within emptiness, or which give meaning to emptiness. After all, we live in an era of resignation and revolt.

www.ivosans.com

• ComissariatAlex Mitrani
• CollaboraArts Santa Mònica - Departament de Cultura