'Bestiary', by Gerard Mas

Ancient mythologies already told us about powerful beings and deities in animal forms as an excuse to provide moral lessons to everyone who wanted to see, in mermaids or harpies, the less pleasant truths. Even later, in the height of science, fables and bestiaries are recovered, which humanize wild, domestic and fantastic animals, endowing them with worldly virtues and faults.

Bestiari , by Gerard Mas, claims human animality, without excuses or metaphors, with a collection of sculptures that relate a conversation between the two species. Through the nobility of marble and the purity of wood, it dignifies animals and demeans human behavior, to cradle babies and piglets on the same bed. The work gives voice to the she-wolf of the well-known Roman myth that feeds without whims and to the babies that are nourished by any mother, with the aim of honoring the common animal power.

The proposal uses the Egyptian imagination to create, through the most contemporary realism, a story that walks along the historical relationship between humans and animals; turned into gods, exploited as a resource or delicately welcomed at home. Mas's work, during the last ten years, presents, through a classical form, images of formal perfection, everyday attitudes and burlesque criticism. In the form of canopies and sarcophagi, the artist lets himself be guided by the material, elevating its defects to achieve a pure aesthetic. The material evokes the form, "ideas are daughters of the material", expresses the artist.

From a broad perspective that cuts through irony, discomfort and absurdity, Bestiari also talks about human nonsense; of the need for companionship, conservation and production; of selfishness and poetry, of inconsistency and freedom.

Mas gathers dogs, cats, birds, babies, piglets and humans at the same table, to exchange the archetypes that each of them has represented since times gone by. Mas takes advantage of craftsmanship to embrace unusual animals in the course of the history of art, beasts such as pigs or rats, as well as breeds that did not exist at that time. Through hyperrealism, Gerard Mas adds color to classic bodies with the polychromatic desire to get even closer to human reality.