Buried under the roots of the tree, 2014
J. L.VELA

María-José Vela studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts, then located in Plaza Verónica, n "2 in Barcelona.

When he finished his degree in 1961, his artistic work, after a brief foray into abstraction, was linked to the figurative movement. In his portraits and urban landscapes, which are characterized by the flat treatment of forms, expressive values are glimpsed that will be constant in his artistic procedure: color, light, the notion of structure and consequently of form, space, rhythm and composition. ; subjectivity on a more conceptual level.

María-José ‚always creates in her works, her Art feeds on impressions, and, as we will see throughout her artistic production, even when part of her immediate environment is not content with imitating the reality that surrounds her, but that each captured figure-form-sign passes through the filter of its interpretation.

During the 70s, María-José ‚presented exhibitions with constructivist works in Barcelona: they are pieces whose support is wooden boxes covered with distorting glass or painted by her and inside which she places various objects (light bulbs, egg cups, etc.), giving it value. to depth as a pictorial and plastic spatial form. * There is a certain relationship with Poor Art, as she uses found and discarded materials.

At the end of the 70s, he made some Pop-Art, because as objects of consumer civilization and popular culture, they were reflected in his canvases (telephone series) as a social protest that is breathed in the atmosphere of the time, *

However this figuration, she soon returns to return to the flat forms of her first figurative language until she ends up in a lyrical abstraction; the contours of her figures lose strength and become diluted, giving way to an abstraction based on the language of the stain in chromatic dissolution and spatial experience.

María-José ‚incorporates new materials and new technical procedures into the formative process of her works because she is increasingly interested in highlighting the textural and atmospheric quantities of her surfaces.

It is the 80s when she delves into material abstractionism, which she will not abandon until now.

She uses natural pictorial pigments, sometimes applied in their pure state, sometimes mixed with oil, binders, varnishes, etc. Adheres to pictorial surfaces, extra-pictorial materials such as powders, cement, metal filings, wires, pieces of metal, ropes, wax, wood shavings, sawdust, rusted iron, plastic materials, wood, beams, everyday objects (generally related to the field of mechanics and nautical), etc.

These non-pictorial elements and objects she incorporates into her work through collage and assembly. *

She also uses the procedure of graphics or stitching, among others, to highlight the material quantities.

Throughout her artistic production, she made continuous and brief forays into the world of sculpture, until the 1990s, when this interest was more forcefully reaffirmed.

However, the continuous search for the new coexists with the permanence of the past, and in fact his sculptures are found objects (again there is a relationship with poor art) that intervenes pictorially and transforms into sculptural paintings: matter becomes a work of art with the ability to excite and produce sensations

The constant desire for analysis and research of her artistic personality is therefore reflected throughout her career, therefore, it is not surprising that in 1994 she presented in Barcelona the exhibition "Ex aequo" inspired by the work of the Renaissance Piero Della Francesca.

It is a return to classical figuration, which María-José ‚felt the need to create and capture in her canvases as a study of the work of this great master of the 500s.

In conclusion, reaffirm that in each of his pieces there is an important relationship between the "form - matter" - matter and technique- and the "form-content" (1), since his personality, as "pure creative will", is not never abstracts from the lived situational historical context, His experiences, his thoughts, his feelings, his ideals and his beliefs are in constant dialogue with the matter, in search of the internal coherence of the work "per se" and in relation to the whole-global - of all its production, with constant expressive values and at the same time continuously renewed.