Riera and Arago

Riera i Aragó - S.T.

Técnica: Mixed technique

Biografía del Artista:

Josep María Riera i Aragó (Barcelona 1954) can be described as a visual poet, a sculptor who is equally at home in the painting studio or the printmaking workshop. Very early in his artistic development, he established a deceptively simple iconography with surprisingly universal and inescapable results. During the 1980s, Riera i Aragó discovered his interest in the marine environment, submarines, airplanes and motor-operated machines. This trace of the machine has since been a clear thread through his work. Each machine he creates is never repetitive, regardless of the medium, evoking without pathos or condescension a sympathetic vision of humanity. The machines not only blur the traditional boundaries between sculpture and painting, ultimately superimposing the two art forms, but also blur the space between functional machines with a direct purpose and the life of objects as pieces of art. Riera i Aragó's work highlights machines, seen in their own dysfunction, in what has been created but never managed to be made. His zeppelins, airplanes, ships and submarines must come to terms with their inability to navigate or fly. In addition to Riera i Aragó’s sculptures made in bronze and sometimes in reclaimed iron, his work also contains paintings and works on paper using the same iconography as the sculptures; propellers, motors and machines. His later painting in particular almost imitates or portrays his sculptures, creating a close narrative between the two. Riera i Aragó’s pieces are essential to understanding some of the most characteristic emblems of our time, the world of machines and artefacts in general. His works speak paradoxically about the machine, about its capacity for suggestion, about a round trip from real to imaginary space.