• Title The Cromlech, a Sacred Place

• Artist: Pedro Osés

• Interpretations 9

• A production by the Oteiza Museum with the collaboration of the Association of Municipal Councils of Pamplona and Kutxa Obra Social

• 1 December 2011 – 15 April, 2012
• Watch the video

Artist Pedro Osés bases his intervention piece at the Oteiza Museum on Jorge Oteiza’s analyses and interpretations of different pieces of prehistoric art and his study of the Pyrenean cromlech as the expression of a “spiritual” space. Osés’s project, “The Cromlech, a Sacred Place” interprets Oteiza’s reflections in an ephemeral narrative and pictorial project. He will create the piece at the Oteiza Museum on 1, 2 and 3 December in full view of visitors to the Centre.

The intervention, which forms part of the “Interpretations” programme, organised with the collaboration of the Pamplona Area Association of Municipalities and Kutxa Obra Social, will be assembled directly on one of the walls of the museum. The piece will consist of an ephemeral collage created on a wall area of 210 x 310 cm and will include texts, drawings and other pictorial elements to make up a narrative and plastic fabric. It will be on view at the Oteiza Museum until the end of the project on April 15, 2012. The artist will perform the intervention on 1 and 2 December during museum opening hours (10 am to 3 pm) and on Saturday 3 December from 11 am to 3 pm, sharing the creative process with anyone interested in learning more about the process.

The germs for Osés’ project are mainly to be found in Oteiza’s aesthetic interpretations of the cromlechs as signs of a symbolic empty space, which he analysed in his publications and with which he entered into dialogue in his “Homage to Padre Donosti”, a piece created in 1959 at the megalithic site at Agiña. “When I decided to create an interpretation of Oteiza’s work, I remembered that in the ‘Quousque tandem’, which I read a long time ago, I was interested in the part in which he talked about the cromlech. According to Oteiza, the cromlech was the artistic culmination of the period, the circle of stones representing total emptiness and not a place of burial. Oteiza considered them to be religious art and related to the Basque term Uts, representing the firmament, the transcendent, the empty”, says Osés. “When I saw these constructions on the hill I wondered who made them and why they erected them there. I think they are points where there is a special energy and that is why they are identified in that way in nature, in the same way as the human body has its meridians and thousands of different energy points”.

Osés’s input to the “Interpretations” season is the latest in a series of pieces by artists such as Pedro Salaberri, José Miguel Corral, Iratxe Montero, David Rodríguez Caballero, José Ignacio Agorreta, Koldo Sebastián, Manu Muniategiandikoetxea and Florencio Alonso. A book of the same name has also been published.

Pedro Osés (Pamplona, 1942), is an artist with a long career. He has exhibited in dozens of solo and group exhibitions and has combined pictorial work with other disciplines related to illustration and comics (www.pedrooses.com).