Riera i Aragó

Riera i Aragó - S.T.

Technique: Watercolor

Artist Biography:

 

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 in the workshop of Print. 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 engine-operated machines. This trace of the machine has been a clear thread throughout his work ever since. Each machine he creates is never repetitive, regardless of the medium, it evokes without pathos or condescension, a sympathetic vision of humanity. The machines not only blur the traditional boundaries between sculpture and painting, ultimately overlapping 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 they have been created but never managed to do. His zeppelins, planes, 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 oeuvre also contains paintings and works on paper using the same iconography as the sculptures; propellers, engines and machines. Especially his later paintings almost imitate or portray his sculptures, creating a close narrative between the two. Riera i Aragó's pieces are essential to the understanding of some of the most characteristic emblems of our time, the world of machines and artifacts in general. His works speak paradoxically about the machine, about its capacity for suggestion, about a journey back and forth from real space to imaginary space.