MOBB ART CLUB at POSITIONS Berlin 2026 | Ciria × Blasco Císcar

MEMORY AS MATERIAL TRACE

Mobb Art Club presents at POSITIONS Berlin Art Fair a dialogue between José Manuel Ciria and Rafael Blasco Císcar: two formally distinct artistic practices connected by a shared line into memory embedded in matter.

Although their languages differ — painting and sculpture — both artists engage with materials that do not begin as blank entities, but as surfaces and structures already carrying history, physical tension and temporal weight.

In both practices, matter is never neutral. It retains marks, stress, scars and traces of its own trajectory.

Rather than representing memory, Ciria and Blasco work directly with it.

JM CIRIA - Cave. Procedures Series. 2025. Oil on canvas. 130 x 130 cm..jpg

José Manuel Ciria is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Spanish abstraction. His painting exists in a field of tension between gesture and structure, chance and control, impulse and restraint.

In his recent work, the use of repurposed truck tarpaulins plays a central role. These supports do not arrive as blank surfaces; they bear folds, abrasions, wear and an accumulated material history.

Rather than concealing that previous life, Ciria incorporates it into the pictorial process. Painting enters into dialogue with those traces, activating and transforming them into essential components of the composition.

Memory therefore appears not as image or narrative, but as physical presence embedded within the surface itself.

Rafael Blasco Císcar develops a sculptural practice focused on the transformation of industrial materials and structures associated with utility, function and, at times, abandonment.

His sculptures evoke industrial anatomies, architectural fragments and bodies in mutation. They operate within tensions between collapse and balance, fragility and resistance, violence and restraint.

Blasco does not erase the material’s prior history; he works through it. Every fold, rivet, curvature and tension retains the memory of an earlier state.

His sculptures function as hybrid bodies in which material memory remains active, reconfigured within a new sculptural language.

THE CONVERGENCE

Ciria and Blasco Císcar meet through a shared understanding of matter as a carrier of time.

In Ciria’s paintings, memory appears through surface, gesture, tension and accumulated traces.

In Blasco Císcar’s sculptures, memory takes shape through volume, structure, residue and transformation.

One works from the pictorial surface. The other from the sculptural body.

Together, their works reveal how matter can preserve what has passed and, at the same time, become something entirely new.

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