Tomàs Pons: the face as a container for the soul

For forty years, the City Council of Castell. Platja d'Aro i s'Agaró has been working to ensure that contemporary art gains a presence in municipal public policies. It has been multiplying and promoting exhibition circuits until it established a network of three spaces with the aim of dynamizing and enhancing contemporary art. Together with the cultural facilities of Castell de Benedormiens and Masia Bas, the Parc dels Estanys is a large natural extension integrated into the urban heart of 150,000 m2 where large-format sculpture merges with an attractive landscape, environmental and tourist environment.

It is in this open-air place that Tomàs Pons (Barcelona, 1974) presents an exhibition of large-format sculptures. With the title 'Univers blau', the artist is inspired by mythical characters from the sea who he tinges with a dose of melancholy. A total of thirteen pieces made in bronze, iron and aluminium form a walk through enormous faces, not interpreted from reality, but from stories that start from the collective imagination. His theme focuses on the human being in the portrait, on the face, but also on the splits, cracks, fissures and breaks until they achieve a totemic ascendancy.

His sculptures have a philosophically based realism in which the debate between polarities such as mind and matter, interior and exterior, empty and full always appears. He has incorporated the Mediterranean influence and the classical legacy, although with a personal reworking. His is a lonely man, isolated from the world, who faces himself and faces a new destiny with dignity. The exhibition refers to the face as a container of the soul where the past is projected into the future. These public works emphasize the artist's commitment to resolving global problems such as climate change. They become the heroes who fight against the destruction of biodiversity in many territories, a fact that acts hastily on climate change.

Tomàs Pons, with a contemporary perspective, has been working for some time on the devastating action that humans are inflicting on nature. Trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and the University of Design Linz, he combines his work as a sculpture professor with artistic creation in his studio.