Moisès Villèlia

Moisés Villelia (Barcelona 1928 – 1994) was a poet and sculptor who turned from figurative wood carvings, with expressively elongated and dynamic profiles, to non-figurative pieces, which take on tubular shapes, using channels and elongated perforations. He learned woodcarving in his father's workshop, who was a renowned craftsman. During his childhood he attended the Dareno school, which applied the Montessori pedagogical method, until the start of the civil war interrupted this rationalist training. At the end of the war, his family moved to Mataró where his mother was appointed director of a furniture factory. He exhibited his first carving at the Museum of Mataró in 1949 and in 1953, and after working with his father on the cabinetry of the chapel of Santa Ana in Mataró, he devoted himself fully to sculpture. He came into contact with personalities from the artistic world such as the poet Rabasseda and the critic Alexandre Cirici and, in 1954, he held his first individual exhibition at the Municipal Museum of Mataró in which he presented some reliefs that combined the influences of modernism and oriental philosophy, that since his teenage readings was a constant in his life. In 1963 he devised assemblies, combinable pieces to the taste of the buyer and his growing interest in nets and grids awoke. With a scholarship from the French Institute, he moved to Paris in 1967, where he mainly worked with perforated paper. In 1969 he traveled to Argentina where his brother, also a sculptor lived, and settled in Quito, the city where he lived until 1972. Upon returning to Spain, he settled in the town of Molló, working on surrealist sculptures in which he used willow wood and assemblages of objects, which provided a certain sense of humor. He passed away in 1994.