THE SOLEMNITY OF THE RUIN

(Excerpt from the Catalogue of the exhibition Guardianes. Xavier Mascaró dans les Jardins du Palais Royal)

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Mascaró has his roots in the Spanish tradition of making realistic religious images that spans from Castilian sculpture to Spanish Baroque painting. His is a figurative language, albeit addressing the non-visible: he began presenting pieces from the world of bullfighting (saddles, tacks, horses, ropes) or from everyday life (toys, crosses, reliquaries, etc.) yet always charged with a human presence, or what we may call, paraphrasing Maurice Blanchot, a human trace, a human absence. An absence that sustains a profoundly tragic outlook on life together with an understanding of history as a ruin yet, at once, a navigation chart towards the future.

 

While monumental and solemn, the two core themes of this exhibition—the ten Buddhas Guardianes and the boat Departure—are also ceremonial works open to the future, not unlike the way in which the Phoenicians saw the soul of boats, for navigation was always viewed as a door opening on the future. In the solemnity of the ruin, in the presence of absence, Mascaró charts the navigation route towards the future of his sculptural work.

 

Spread over eighteen metres, the seven pieces comprising Departure are almost structured as if they were seven pieces of a shipwreck rescued by the artist in seven dives down into its sunken structure. Mascaró presents a boat crucified in iron, a material moulded in sand. Then, in the passion of fire, the iron symbolises his preaching on death, on the passing of time of that ship that was once a ceremonial vessel and is now a witness and a memory. Just like the ten Guardianes which, while guardians, are also the defence of a vision of the world and a memory of a civilisation. Ten equal pieces, cast from the same inner mould but with very different textures. Their fractures, the action of time on them, the traces of destruction, are different in each one. They carry a Trojan horse inside them that makes each one explode outwards in a different way. Equal in their simplicity, yet different in their configuration. If the Boat marks or pre-figure a route, a passage, here, at the Palais, the Buddhas outline a new path.

 

This body of work is not offered to us as a poetic archaeology, as an aesthetic of the ruin, but as a trace of the shipwreck that we may use to reflect on the future. The whole of Mascaró’s work has the appearance of a charred iconography, acknowledging the principles of Cistercian asceticism, of sobriety in iconography, or a certain musicality and the praise of the ruin.

 

Among his early iron cast sculptures from 1995-8 (Solemnity, Gravity, Faith, Hope, Spirituality, etc.) we already find works like Solemnity, consisting of three pieces spread out in a room, at three metres distance from each other, one of them standing 107 cm high. They are like three weights from gigantic scales dominating the whole space. The artist’s visual thought is based on a subversion of the objects, on a reconfiguration more than on a paraphrasing (as, for instance, Bacon with Velázquez). Those quoted pieces also show their couplings, their troughs as expressive elements, just like Julio González uses welding not only to make his pieces, but as texture and form of expression. In Mascaró there is a constant use of the frame, of the iron armature as if it were a pedestal. If Brancusi eliminated the pedestal or turned it into an integral part of sculpture, Mascaró rests many of his pieces on a frame on which he “arms,” in the medieval sense of the term, his clothes, his image, his icon.

 

The first boats, titled Departure, were made in 2000. The frames raise the viewpoint so as to help the image to acquire a more monumental bearing. The year of 2002 ended with pieces such as Fossile, where stone and iron play with the memory of Alexander Calder’s mobile sculpture, not with humour but with sadness. The piece demands the attention of two contraries, mobility and the fragility of the constituent materials of iron and stone. The galvanised structure reduces the notion of mass to the bare sketch of the skeleton (as in electricity towers), and the fossil emerges as a crystallised form. Now, eight years after his first small boat, the huge ceremonial piece of Departure shows its ribs, its architectural skeleton as pure form, like the incense for a poetic journey.

 

Those notions of the skeleton as journey were already present, before the actual boats themselves, back in 1996, in his fascinating notebooks and drawings. Apart from daily annotations or telephone numbers, in those notebooks we see the preliminary ideas for a sculpture or for a series, or notes on how to execute a piece: for instance, Cabeza de caballo [Horse’s Head], the possible locations for the iron runners, or the deconstruction of a bull into pieces as if it were a spine, while he writes down the idea of carrying out a photographic chain of a newly born in “a number of photographic links.” Then, he writes: “the images are intertwined with images of glass containers full of water (accumulation of jugs and bottles); a liquid element, transparency.” He plays with ideas he would later render in iron, Fossile or Bélier, seen in sequences that are transparent due to the lack of mass. On other page he writes about how to achieve the texture of a nightdress by “patching up the interior of the mould.”

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Kosme de Barañano

Professor in Art History

Altea