The contemporary view of the accepted sculptural practice of the last century, with its roots in Duchamp (along with Picasso, the fathers of all ‘bastards’) contains within the folds of its pages Cragg, Kapoor and Deacon, of the New British Sculpture school. Being tied together by their ‘fascination for the object’, they use (among other ‘ages’) assemblage, decoupage and bricolage in conjunction with the desire to work in the most immediate reality of an ever-more various, speeding timeframe of the now. Using Anna M. Guasch’s words: “The New Sculpture was like a little theatre of the emotional world that would link the waste of society to the old memories of childhood” (that “wooden horse” often quoted by Gombrich). Among them all, it might be fair to outstand Kapoor’s perspective, much sharper when noticing possible transcendences: for the Indian artist (and for other partners such as Anthony Gormley or Shiraeh Houshiary) it was necessary to head towards more archetypal content which would somehow always flow into the great pantheist delta where all the rivers of vagueness end their speculative journey.
For the avoidance of misunderstandings we are schematically and partially pointing this all out because, at first sight, Gerard Mas doesn’t fit the ‘official’ narrative with regards to sculpture nor any ramifications of a discipline which seems to have lost its North (designing little theatres of the emotional world). Moreover, on first glance the appearance of the work links it to a tradition focussed on volume rather than space (Rodin vs. Brancusi). Compounded by a ‘narrative’ element which disguises the creative genius in its safe cloak of virtuosity. The essential question arising is one of whether Mas’ work is in dialogue and with what. Could Mas be a skilled exhibitionist, taking advantage of our clumsy times, filling the blanks in our sensitivity with theory and concepts —or perhaps contrarily his role is to repeat with irony in order to reveal our obsessions, gaps and absurdist goals?
Delving into Mas’ universe then, we follow the latter reading of an artist who has created an ironic dialogue with the past; everything is what it appears to be yet is simultaneously something else. As T. S. Eliot said in unrepeatable lines: “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past”. His work participates in the ontological problem of defining ‘old’ and ‘new’; nothing completely ‘new’ or ‘old’ exists, all states are in relation to context. The ‘new’ can only happen as something is transgressed and overcome; Boris Groys, the philosopher of novelty, would agree: “Innovation doesn’t mean the apparition of something that was hidden but changing the value of something for ever seen and known”.
In our literary tradition, the formula to solve the problem is provided by the poet J. V. Foix: “The old museum, the blurry Madonas, / And the extreme painting of today! Naïve fit: / I’m excited by the new and in love with the old world”. Excitement and love meet in a single subject that becomes the complete receiver of the work of art by synthesizing these extremes (according to Pere Gimferrer, this synthesis would be what creates the balance in Foix’s classicism). This dialogue of artists and poets with their past —also Miró dialogued with Modest Urgell, Tàpies with the Romanesque period, Perejaume with Verdaguer…— demonstrates to us the impossibility of building anything new without solid foundations in previous works of art. We can understand our tradition in many ways, we can question and even deny it, but that doesn’t mean tradition isn’t essential to build the myth of modernity.
Here is where the strength and surprising originality lies in Gerard Mas’ work: the skilful use of materials to bring the past into dialogue with present. All of this, as we started this article saying, allows us to place Gerard Mas in a territory beyond history where sculpture, free from all modern impositions (included Duchamp), dialogues with the past in order to enlighten our present.
