Avio del frac 2013

painted steel and alunimium

Spaniard Josep Riera I Arago was born and raised in Barcelona. There is much to tell about this special artist for whom sea, wind and water always play a major role in his artworks. For many years he shared a studio with another most famous Spanish artist, Miro, who is reflected in the way he uses colours in his own paintings and sculptures. Riera likes to work in bronze and iron. Many of his bronze sculptures show minute details of marine life such as shells for example.

In his steel sculptures, such as the sculpture ‘Avio de frac’ that can be seen in Oisterwijk, he details the sculpture with his own recurrent ‘Miro’ colours. He calls these sculptures Arials. With this work, he highlights the machine and technology in its own dysfunction and thus what technology was actually designed for. This gives the technique an almost poetic meaning and appearance, just like all those other sculptures that Riera made.

This arial not only blurs the traditional boundaries between sculpture and painting, eventually causing the two art forms to overlap, this one also blurs the space between functional machines with a direct purpose and life of objects as artifacts!