Riera i Aragó: a journey through fifty years of experience

Conxita Oliver

Riera i Aragó is one of the artists who emerged and stood out in the eighties in Catalonia as part of a generation that reactivated sculpture, assimilating new concepts and object processes. Half a century after his first exhibition, the Marlborough Gallery presents "El bell viatge", an essential and very personal itinerary with a set of works that the artist has decided to keep throughout his career. Through its most significant stages, the guiding thread becomes the dysfunctional artifact capable of flying or navigating. Since its inception, its creation manifested itself as indebted to mechanics, physics and the inspiring principles of modern science, and also very close to a mythical and ancestral world. Three-dimensional compositions, ironic scenographies that can refer both to totemic themes of a magical and ritual dimension, as well as to technologies of modern society in reference to the critique of the irrational power of machines.

The new Catalan sculpture that emerged in the 1980s opened up new paths, taking up the weight of the Catalan sculptural tradition, founded by Julio González and by a review of the key figures of the avant-garde. Riera i Aragó (Barcelona, 1954) is one of the protagonists of the recovery of the sculptural practice that the avant-garde of the thirties, starting with iron, had begun. As one of his followers, he maintains a special sensitivity for traditional materials that he often recycles to focus all of his plastic discourse around mythical scenes about machinery. In many cases, the passage of time is observed through these rescued materials and recomposed into witnesses of industrialization.

Interested in mechanical gadgets, flying and aquatic devices, recreational physics and scientific-literary culture, he has produced a very characteristic playful and poetic iconography, inspired by the world of submarines, zeppelins, planes, propellers, wheels... all of this is the axis of many of his sculptures and installations. Some references that he has been debugging and loading with anti-war messages and awareness of climate change. The works of Riera i Aragó are essential for understanding some of the emblems of our time, where devices and hardware in general and their relationship with nature or ecological values are always present.

Transgressor of situations, great nostalgic for the past and tireless traveler, the artist has often insisted on accentuating the archaeologist concept of his work with a catastrophic accent of abandoned marine vestiges or aged industrial residues due to the passage of time, always loaded with memory, since what is most interesting in Riera i Aragó is the footprint, the trace and the footprint. Around these references he has created a very personal cosmos that he has been formally synthesizing until reaching the current stage in which austerity and sobriety have evolved into mere skeletons, into light constructions of airlines that are drawn in space. His sculptures and paintings have ended up configuring a cartography of fantastic worlds and impossible mechanisms that, far from being an illusion, appear strangely tangible on a round trip from reality to fiction.

The exhibition "The beautiful journey" allows us to travel a long and prolific journey, where we find the different materials, techniques and supports that Riera i Aragó has used to create its airplanes, submarines and different devices. It brings together a represented selection of works that are part of his private collection, that he has kept over the years and that are part of his most intimate work. Although the reference to the machine seems to be the main character, in reality it goes much further, as Vicenç Altaió points out in the catalog text: “I like it when Riera i Aragó explains that the pair of technological artifacts comes from the schematic sign of a man and a woman placed horizontally. Of standing in the recumbent body and its psychic transformation. The artist began his work by creating an iconicity of figurative signs, they are schematic drawings until, by reduction and personalization, the plane, a body that rises, becomes the first letter of the alphabet. ” A metamorphosis that changes these sculptures into anthropological approximations; in characters that become inhabitants of imagined spaces.

The exhibition, conceived as a walk through the most recurring themes of his creation, begins in the eighties and ends today. But, if the fascination for the functional machine has been valued artistically throughout history, from the Renaissance to the present, on the contrary, the vision that Riera i Aragó grants to his ingenuity is to deny its usefulness and the its functionality. In this sense, this negation fascinates him because of the character of remainder or waste that it drags along: it transmutes the functions of the most modern submarine and ship or the most futuristic airplane until it metamorphoses them into useless gears, as a metaphor for the failure of the modern and technical era.

His unique language began in 1981 when he set out to draw a picture of what happened during the day. It was an exercise that he completed for 365 days and during that time he also developed an interest in machines, the exploration of unknown landscapes and object recovery, without neglecting the artists he admired such as Miró and Klee. The artist himself affirms that thanks to this exercise, he found a series of formal symbols that have constituted the essence of everything he has done. It is during this time that he will begin to produce works using the remains of scrapped ships and the propellers will be more and more present in his works. Each country he visits, be it Morocco, Japan or Australia, inspires him to explore new territories and strengthen his own discourse.

With a limited visual vocabulary, Riera i Aragó develops a fertile iconography loaded with meaning that, endowed with a clear irony, speaks of the absurd recklessness of man's creations when they turn against him. All of his work is anti-war, since for example when the submarine is presented as a ruin it is a criticism of our civilization of which only loopholes will remain. Along these lines, the installation Submarinos de las islas Baleares (1997) is very impressive, made up of seven hanging submarines with a diversification of the chromaticism of the patinas to such an extent that each element has a different chromatic finish. These marine remains become gigantic three-dimensional brushstrokes, with an arid gesture, a rustic body and solid residue, which collapse along the wall. Riera i Aragó's peculiar planes, represented only by a few propellers, are present in the exhibition in different works, such as 48 black planes (1992); an installation with forty-eight small-format flying utensils. Likewise, the great triptych Airplane (1987) brings us closer to the inventions of Leonardo da Vinci, through a kind of scientific diagrams that draw cryptic and hidden presences. Another recurring theme such as the seabed is represented by Mar y barca (1999), a structure, at ground level, made with bronze and gold leaf that sacralizes the waters of our oceans.

The works in which sculpture and painting converge have been the subject of dedication by Riera i Aragó since l990, manifested between forms in real space and those represented on a flat surface. In this sense, what she tries is to collect the same problems that she addresses in three-dimensionality, but only altering the means of expression. In her hands, the two-dimensional work ceases to be the support of a representation or fiction to become a phenomenon of a signic nature. The series of twenty-four drawings entitled Australia (2005) -which recreate light flying constructions- show the contrasting forces in a game of tensions between the horizontal and the vertical.

From the year 2000 she has not abandoned machines, but her work takes a turn towards nature. She then modifies the shape of the plane into anthropomorphic beings that observe the horizon and that sea that is drying up, as a premonition of the future desertification of the planet. She progressively synthesizes the artifact extremely, seeking maximum simplicity, to reach the current stage in which she is characterized by austerity, sobriety and formal purity, forming weightless architectures with a great sense of space. Variations on an elongated airplane (2022), produced in bronze painted in primary colors, affirm their horizontality as majestic current totems.

Riera i Aragó's ability to create stories, invent and find variations on a theme or an idea seems infinite; a universe of his, highly imaginative and refined, which is even more complex to conceive taking into account the imposition of formal brevity. At times, the artist himself has misrepresented the role of his artifacts by making a flying submarine, an aquatic zeppelin or often transforming them into monsters or animals, such as the series of mosquito-planes, or submarines with a fish tail.

Some individual exhibitions in galleries and museums include the Städtische Museen in Heilbronn and the Art Center in Berlin Friedrischstrasse (Germany); the Van Gogh Foundation in Arles (France) or the PMMK Museum vor Moderne Kunst in Oostende (Belgium). The Riera i Aragó, Aiguaforts exhibition, a selection of more than 60 etchings, was exhibited in 2012 at the headquarters of the Instituto Cervantes in various European cities. Among the best-known public works are: Buried Submarine, Hiroshima Gardens, Barcelona; Low relief, La Rambla; Municipal Building, Barcelona; Large soft submarine, Santander; Great plane with yellow, Figueres; Tired plane, Merignac (France); Najio Plane, Nishinomiya (Japan); Bas-relief of the Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona; Ramon Llull bas-relief, Blanquerna Faculty of Communication Sciences, Barcelona; Arals, Mesen (Belgium) and Arals Turf, Roosendaal (The Netherlands).

Author：Conxita Oliver (Spain, b. 1957)
Conxita Oliver is a famous Spanish art historian and curator.