A Don Quijote of one square kilometer was plowed right before the beginning of the new year by sculptor Angel Orensanz with the enthusiastic support of the residents of Dos Barrios, a small town fifty kilometers equally distant from Madrid and Toledo, in the heart of Castile. The land art work has instantly become a cultural sensation due to the fact that the intervention of Orensanz comes at the end of the world year long celebration of the 400th anniversary of the publication of the novel “Don Quijote”. The proportions and the perspectives of the art work surpasses the human scale forcing the visitor to make sense out of mountain lines, ravines and crevices that fuse in the horizon. Only by plane can people get a total picture; what has thrust a nearby flying school to a thriving business.
Angel Orensanz has planned his Don Quijote for a full year of life and growth. Besides contributing with tractors the residents of Dos Barrios helped the artist to sow several kinds of cebada, centeno y avena that followed immediately the plowing of the field. The artists wants the soil to do its part by changing with the arrival of the Spring into different shades of green and textures of growth in a calculated scheme of shapes and forms that stress the gigantic earth composition.
To a group of reporters in the airport of Madrid/Barajas, on his way of return to Paris, Angel Orensanz commented: “Come the Spring, the youths and the adults of the area will come to this plot of land to sing, dance and set bonfires. We are going to mark the arrival of the carnival like in the times of old, like in the times of Goya”. The artist sees this as a wide land art piece in which, of which he has developed several over the last twenty years in several parts of the world, in the Aragonese Pyrenees, in the banks of the river Omono. The artist is trying to return and relate a myth to a land and a people for which the book and its characters were created. Later on, in Paris, Angel Orensanz insisted “on the need of returning the image of a Don Quijote to a time of global correctness. When everybody is closing the book on Don Quijote, is is time to bring him out, to bring everybody out.”
The artwork is located between the towns of Dos Barrios and Ocana; immediately close to the highway of Madrid to Bailen and Toledo; 50 kms. South of Madrid.
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