Limes is the site-specific public artwork conceived by Edoardo Tresoldi for the 25th Anniversary of L’Illa Diagonal, the building designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Rafael Moneo and Manuel de Solà-Morales. Overlooking the scenic Avinguda Diagonal, one of the major arteries of Barcelona, the impressive architectural complex has won several international awards, including the FAD Architecture Award in 1994.
The artwork is exhibited on the roof of L’Illa from December 4th until January 26th, and will then be partially re-installed in the large and bright interior spaces. Limes extends entirely on the highest point of the building – 56 meters high – by taking advantage of its angular development. The installation is composed of six transparent 5,50 meters high volumes differently arranged along the edge of the roof, each of them evolving into a face.
The artwork interacts with the architectural shapes of L’Illa, but its rhythmic cadence is altered by the different orientations of the sculptures overlooking the public space below. The play between abstract and figurative elements determines its plastic tensions in an ever-changing alternation of full and empty spaces, perceptible as you move around the building.
Limes marks a return to figurative sculpture in Tresoldi‘s poetics, yet in the new perspective of the urban scale. The intervention is a reflection on the public space meant as a theater of human interactions: a place in which the spatial perceptions are punctuated by fleeting encounters that generate subjective experiences and memories.
The Absent Matter, unique to Tresoldi’s poetics and expressed through the wire mesh, is represented here as the immaterial architecture born from similar dynamics: an ethereal space rhythmated by constantly different chemical and empathic interactions. Arranged in sequence, the sculptures follow one another by alternating visual harmonies and volumetric tensions and revealing their contents either gradually or at once. Depending on the perspective of the observer, Limes evolves while its elements capture the light and blend with the sky.
