Having learned all the secrets of the trade and worked for others, Mariano Andrés Vilella (Saragossa, 1930) decided to work as a sculptor for himself and so began a career as categorical as it is personal, in which he has created an internationally-renowned, three-dimensional world. Few present-day sculptors can imagine and bring their work to life with the wisdom shown by our artist, resident in Barcelona for more than half a century.
His hands are at work in Villa Manolita’s studio, in the Marina del Port neighbourhood, crafting ‘corals’, ‘spheres’, ‘fusions’, ‘ovals’ and ‘unions’; in other words, he deploys an imagination of the most peculiar things whereby research of the form is expressed through each one of these random series. From on an in-depth knowledge of the possibilities and limits of marble, travertine and basalt, Mariano Andrés Vilella searches, explores, smoothens and polishes each block of rock until he creates an extreme plasticity in the forms, to the point at which the raw material seems to become dynamic and takes us to a universe that is both self-referential and cosmic: hence the common presence of a sphere surprisingly built into an empty space in his own work, or the concentration of contradictory pulses so masterfully crafted from a ubiquitous centre of gravity.
Beyond titles and series, each of his works displays as much an absolute knowledge of his trade as the desire to transcend that through the embodiment of a world in which beauty, risk and rhythm go hand in hand far beyond any imaginable limits.
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