The seven large-scale architectonic sculptures by Sergi Aguilar at the Fundació Joan Miró, substantiate the common impulse at the core of architecture and sculpture. Yet Aguilar’s use of space is neither functional nor decorative; rather, these pieces divide space in order to articulate the void that surrounds them. Deserts of metal, born of the artist’s silence, these works articulate an internal dissolution, giving time and space geometric shape without proposing a finality that might be alien to them. Indeed, they speak of the very essence of migration and change, even while implicitly embodying finity, as representations through which hidden contents are insinuated.

For Aguilar, concrete representation reveals essences, even at the expense of a fuller texture of experience. Each constituent part of an individual work exists first as an indefinite form prior to its assembly into a new sculptural identity. Though the esthetic effect is more immediate in works that delimit a large space, the arduous process of artistic gestation that animates all of the work is best appreciated in the smaller pieces. Each one is the result of an idea that denies the functionality of the object and embraces all that is uncertain.

Steel has been Aguilar’s material of choice for the past two years, and the way he employs the metal makes it seem even heavier than it is. Yet the impression of solidity comes also from its profiles and the resulting hardness of line. Tinnit, 1990, consists of two marble rectangles in the center of irregular polygons. So long, 1990, is a sculpture comprised of four pieces grouped in pairs: two equidistant cylinders and two adjoining walls resembling open doors on one side. In most of Aguilar’s works, the wall not only determines the work’s frontality but also its limit, its border, and the periphery between reality and what does not yet exist. Aguilar’s sculptural works never seem to require interpretation; their construction and installation reveal their essence.

—Menene Gras Balaguer

Translated from the Spanish by Hanna Hannah.