This show’s theme, as the title mentions, is the interest to recover and reformulate the iconographic value  of the different objects that a cultures from a diverse range of cultures, and turn them through the artists’s language, into contemporary objects from our culture. During the process, Mascaró uses a combination of materials that mix with each other and break into a iconic representation of recovered icons.

Mascaró experiments constantly with materials to find new methods to produce the sculptural pieces, making modifications to the traditional iron and bronze melting techniques, as well as ceramic glazing and firing, processes that mix in many of the exhibition pieces.

In his own words, it’s “through the thermal contrast that the ceramic experiments when touching the metals in both hot and cool phases and its contraction, braking both elements, intentionally making accidental and unexpected results”. Or also, “both materials end up completely joined after mixing and breaking”. More recently, in other sculptures, Mascaró has worked joining and welding different circular elements inside the iron, and after he adds plaster and paper with smooth color tones.

The result of this research, and from altering traditional processes, in his innovative combinations, are the pieces that reflect the tension, a duality of opposite poles: In these pieces we find strength and vulnerability, heaviness and lightness, air and mass, as a metaphor where paradoxes that are essentially human, where often opposites are attracted: Love and hate, happiness and sadness,  strength and sweetness.

This desire to combine mental strength and fragility in ceramics is the origin of Mascaró’s sculptures like The Guardian, a fragmented version  of the most recognizable works of the artist in the last decade. About the use of these surrounding metals, Mascaró comments that “the restraints – metaphorical- but also physical in which I capture symbols and icons found in history and collective memories to keep them in my mind”. This same procedure has been implemented in other works to represent boats, lying couples, or heads as Geisha and Eleonora, also present in the exhibition.

Some other works, two Hikers and two Eleonara heads, conceived as a ‘drawing in space’ made of small metallic circles  sparkled with white matter, work as counterpoint for the exhibition.

Mascaró wants to build a game with the ‘cultural objects’ from the past, the reinvention of ancient and tradicional techniques and symbols. As a hint to the history, he turns to the past Tang dynasty ceramics, etruscan terracotta and other cultures, recent and millennial, in a amalgam that crystalizes and transforms into his ‘cultural objects’ from today.