Terra sota diluvi / Land under flood, 2006

María José Vela  

María-José Vela studied in the Faculty of Fine Arts then located in plaça  Verònica, 2 in Barcelona. 

When she got her degree, in 1961, her artistic job, after a brief incursion in abstraction, connects to figurative movement. In her portraits and urban landscapes whose characteristics are the flat treatment of shapes, we can perceive expressive values that will be constant in her artistic proceeding: colour, light, notion of structure and consequently of shape, space, rhythm and composition. Subjectively, in a more conceptual level. 

María-José always creates in her works. Her Art is fed of impressions, and as we will see all along her artistic production, even when she starts from her close setting she didn't only imitate her surrounding reality, but each figure-shape-sign goes through her interpretation's filter. 

During the seventies, María-José presents in Barcelona exhibitions with constructivist works.  They are pieces whose support are wood's boxes. Its tops are distorting glasses or painted by her. Into the boxes there are several objects (bulbs, egg boxes, etc.) giving a value to depth as a pictorial and plastic special shape. *There is a certain relationship with poor art, as she uses found or smashed material. 

By the end of the seventies, she carries out some things of Pop-Art because, as they are objects of the consumer society and popular culture, they are reflected in her canvas (Telefónica's serie) as a social protest which is connected to atmosphere's period* 

Nevertheless, she will come back very soon to the flat shapes of her first figurative language until ending in a lyric abstraction. Outlines of her forms are not then so strong and they are dissolved going into an abstraction based on the characteristic language of stain in chromatic dissolution and of spatial experience. 

María-José introduces to formative process of her works new material and new technical proceedings because she is becoming interested in standing out the quantity of text and atmosphere of her surfaces. 

It's in the eighties when she goes into the material abstractionism that she won't give up until now. 

She uses natural pictorial pigments, sometimes applied in its pure state, sometimes mixed with oils, agglutinants, varnishes, etc. She adheres to pictorial surfaces, extra-pictorial material like powder, concrete, metallic fillings, wires, pieces of metal, ropes, wax, sawdust of shaving's wood, rusty iron, plastic material, woods, beams, objects of daily use (in general related to mechanics and nautical fields), etc. 

These non-pictorial elements and objects are introduced to the work through collage and assembly.* 

She also uses graphics or sewing procedures, among other, to stand out numeric quantities. 

All along her artistic production she does continuous and brief incursions into sculpture's world. In the nineties this interest is strongly reasserted. 

Nevertheless, her continuous research of what is new, coexists with the remains of the past, and in fact her sculptures are found objects (again there is a relationship wit poor art) that she manipulates in a pictorial way and they turned into sculpture-paintings. Material becomes a work's art capable to emotion and to produce sensations.   

Her constant eagerness of analysis and research of her artistic personality is reflected all along her career. So, it's not strange that in1994 she presented in Barcelona the exhibition Ex aequo inspired by the work of the Renaissance Piero Della Francesca. 

It represents a return to classical forms that María-José needed to realise and to reflect on her canvas. It is a study of the work of this great master of the 500. 

As a conclusion, we reaffirm that in each one of her pieces there is an important relationship between "shape-material"- material and technique- and "shape-content" (1), because her personality, as a "pure creative will", is never abstracted from the situational and historical context she lived. Her experiences, thoughts, feelings, ideals and belief are in continuous dialogue with material, looking for interior coherence of work per se and in relation to the global whole of all of her production, with expressive constant values and, at the same time, continuously renewed.