Season of tears is the title given to the installation presented by Soledad Sevilla (Valencia, 1944) in CaixaForum. The work marks the beginning of a cycle of modern art interventions in the Secret Garden. Designed by Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, the Secret Garden is a rectangular space that incorporates a thin sheet of water located at the entrance to ”la Caixa” Foundation's social and cultural centre. Architecture, light and water, the essential parts of Sevilla's work, are the very constitutive elements of the Secret Garden's white space. The artist brings them back into play in Season of tears, a work born out of her sense of commitment to the world in today's dire situation. In this work, the ideas related to ruin and devastation that make up her most recent creative evolution are manifested in the repetition throughout the entire space of the phrase that entitles the installation: season of tears (temporada de lágrimas). The words stick to the walls like a rash breaking out over the white stone, in a metaphor for modern society's suffering. Words and water become poetic idioms linking artistic space with the reality that so brutally tortures the collective conscience nowadays. Season of tears is part of the Open spaces cycle, a programme of contemporary artists' interventions on the CaixaForum architecture and the various spaces found outside the exhibition halls.Soledad Sevilla's Season of tears installation can be visited at CaixaForum (avenida del Marquès de Comillas, 6-8), from 12 March to 31 August, 2003. Soledad Sevilla, winner of the 1993 National Plastic Arts Award, is an artist with a longstanding, widely-applauded career in painting and installations. Her canvases have been distinguished as vehicles to spatial atmospheres, and her installations wrap spectators in environs rife with poetic content. These works articulate spaces and condition our perceptions albeit subtly in the quest to attach meaning to our existence.Season of tearsis an ephemeral installation exclusively conceived for the Secret Garden "The temporariness of the installations is one of the features I like most. Their ephemeral quality is an added value, I think. We take as art so many things that, as everyone knows, are ephemeral: dance, music or bullfighting. This hadn't emerged in plastic arts until the 20th century. I'm very interested in it as an experiment, because oftentimes the accumulation of elements, of objects, weighs me down. In that way, ephemeral art is perfect: it happens then it disappears. The fact that the installation is produced within a given time and space and later only the memory of it remains gives it a highly suggestive poetic angle," says the artist.The installation forms part of the Open spaces cycle, a programme of contemporary artists' interventions on the CaixaForum architecture and its spaces outside the exhibition halls. Although the cycle was kicked off in November 2002 with Chema Alvargonzalez' massive light installation (Puntosdeluz.net), to conclude next 30 March, Soledad Sevilla's work is the inauguration of the Secret Garden, a space unused up to now. On Season of tears,Sevilla writes, "The solid peacefulness of ponds is no longer possible; we're living out the twilight of conscientiousness and ethics," Sevilla's Fons et origo (1987) is part of the Contemporary Art Collection. Light and water are also its key ingredients. This work was prepared for ”la Caixa” Foundation's Sala Montcada, and was the culmination of a pictorial series dedicated to the Alhambra spanning 1986.Season of tearsFrom 12 March to 31 August, 2003CaixaForumAv. Marquès de Comillas, 6-808038 Barcelonawww.fundacio.lacaixa.esTel.: 902 22 30 40Hours:From Tuesday to Sunday, 10 am to 8 pmMondays, closedFree admissionwww.fundacio.lacaixa.es