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The works of Xavier Medina-Campeny are present all over the world. Yet his sculpture also has a very special place in Girona.
He created Salt in 2006 for the roundabout at the AP-7 motorway entry for the town of the same name. Salt is based on the harmony of the numeric sequence of Fibonacci (2-2-4-6). It is 14 metres long and consists of 4 steel pedestals with the letters S-A-L-T; each is the sum of the previous one. The sculpture is illuminated from within at night, and the first thing motorists see on leaving or entering the motorway is the name of SALT. The sculpture has become a symbol of the town, both through its characteristics and its strategic location. A reproduction of this work is the trophy given to the winners of the Salt literary prize “El setè cel”.
A few years earlier, in 1999, Medina-Campeny installed two other sculptures in Salt: Indret Familiar, popularly known as L’ocell, on the Josep Tarradellas avenue, and L’hortolà on the avenue Cuitat de Girona. It is a minimalist representation of an arm holding a handle and evokes the consistency of the rural world.
Other works of this artist around Girona are a row of faces in Palamós – The Talk of Town (2005) – or the Retrat de Dalí (2005) in Figueres, a three meters high tube of steel on which is reflected a face of Salvador Dali placed on the floor in stone tiles with small iron spirals. The tube is slightly inclined to facilitate the viewing of the face and exclude reflections of cars.
In Barcelona, the artist erected the well-known statue La Colometa (1984) on the Diamant Square in the Gràcia neighbourhood.
These are but some examples of the prolific public work of Medina Campeny. He believes two of his works are basic and full of meaning: The Conversation (1980) – a visual dialogue installed in a lake with a naked woman taken from Manet and a David by Michelangelo that is an allegory of communication. The other is The Mirror (1984) with which he portrays the opposite, the lack of communication.
Through fragmentation, profiles, and silhouettes, by representing presence through absence, with irony and scepticism as basic traits of his work, Medina-Campeny has progressed from the abstract constructivism of his beginnings to the humanisation of the animalistic world, and from here on to the human body and its parts. In recent times though, the cylinder has become body and presence, because he transforms his quintessential fragmentary bodies into columns. But these are not columns that watch time passing passively, they are human columns. The principal aim of this artist is to elicit emotions.
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