The quality, diversity and uniqueness of Xavier Mascaró’s (Paris, 1965) sculptures, drawings, installations and stage designs make him one of the most important Spanish artists on today’s art scene. Mascaró graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona in 1988. His sculptural career includes numerous experiences, works and exhibitions, both at a national and international level. Although his career began in the late eighties in the field of painting, his interests soon extended into volumetric and spatial sculpture. Initially, the material chosen to flesh out his work was cast iron, as can be seen in many of the pieces in this exhibition; a noble and ancient material, which he has managed to turn into a source of new sculptural solutions making it a typically Spanish tradition, alongside sculptors like Julio González, Oteiza, Chillida, Cristina Iglesias, Juan Muñoz and Susana Solano, while maintaining a personal language. Later Mascaró incorporates new elements and procedures into his works, such as stone, ceramics, resins, glass, bronze, textiles, plaster, tin, fibre, and even video, in this way extending the registers of its timeless and spiritual sculptural syntax.
Mascaró’s sculptural work is very diverse and difficult to classify. His creation has great visual and conceptual vigour and his work is frequently produced in thematic series, as well as the use of large volumes and the artistic shaping of forms in continuous tension. This is in addition to the presence of a strong symbolic load, as well as a wide range of iconographic elements that populate his sculptures: animals, dragons, fictional saurians, helmets, armour, bull tracks, crossings, hands. All this, along with the versatility of the materials used, the reflection of nature and culture, and a certain narrative and argumentative air which end up acquiring pure scenographic tinges, are some of the features with which the artist creates his very personal and characteristic work.
The exhibition Mascaró at Silos has been almost entirely conceived especially for this unique Benedictine space; there is a total of eleven sculptures of different shapes and materials, as well as four drawings, with predominating iconographies where a mythical and ancestral theme stands out, with traces of history and times forgotten which simultaneously stage the tracks of future, post-industrial archaeologies in an ambivalence of past and collective, and in turn, future and personal times.
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