In contemporary sculpture, where the din of spectacle and the acceleration of production often reduce material to mere commodity, Mario Molins insists on sculpture as a ritual of remembrance, a mystical dialogue between body, nature, and spirit. His oeuvre does not present itself as a mere catalogue of objects, nor as an accumulation of formal experiments. Instead, it unfolds as a coherent, almost liturgical practice, one that transforms the act of pruning, inherited from his grandfather, into the foundation of a sculptural language that is at once personal, ancestral, and metaphysical.

Born in Binéfar in 1983, trained at the University of Barcelona, Molins’s biography reads like that of many European sculptors who have navigated the passage from academic formation to professional recognition. He has exhibited in Spain and abroad, created monumental public works, and earned prizes from institutions and critics. Yet what distinguishes Molins from his contemporaries is not curriculum but conviction. His practice is not grounded in institutional discourse or market trends; it grows instead from a lived intimacy with the earth, from a ritual gesture repeated across generations: pruning.

Pruning is not, for Molins, a technical agricultural act. It is a ceremony, a rite of care, an incision that balances death and renewal. It was learned at his grandfather’s side, where the gesture of cutting was both pedagogical and paternal. When Alzheimer’s disease began to erode his grandfather’s memory, pruning became more than an agrarian routine; it was transfigured into an act of remembrance. In Molins’s imagination, the grandfather became an olive tree, rooted in ancestral soil yet vulnerable to decay. Pruning became the intimate way of continuing to care for him: each cut a caress, each wound a conversation, each renewed branch a refusal of oblivion.

This deeply personal revelation is what animates Molins’s practice as a whole. His sculptures, whether monumental or intimate, carry within them the echo of this ritual dialogue. They are not objects produced in the neutral space of the studio; they are continuations of a ceremony that began in the olive groves of his youth. The chisel, the saw, the ink, all are extensions of the pruning gesture. And the sculptures themselves are not silent masses; they are interlocutors, bodies with which the artist and viewer alike enter into dialogue.

The mystical aspect of Molins’s work emerges from this continuity between the personal and the cosmic. The olive tree is not only his grandfather; it is also a symbol of Mediterranean longevity, of peace, of resilience. The cypress is not only a felled tree; it is also the funerary axis of ascent, the vertical that connects earth to sky. The void hollowed into wood is not only a negative space; it is also the dark sun of consciousness, the shadow of vision itself. Molins’s works, in their diversity of form, participate in a shared logic: they are attempts to reveal that life and death are not opposites but phases of an uninterrupted continuum.

What Molins offers the viewer, therefore, is not only visual form but a spiritual itinerary: a journey of the soul through nature. This journey is not linear but cyclical. It begins in memory, in the intimate care of the grandfather, and expands into the broader rhythm of life and death as articulated in the vegetal world. It passes through catharsis—through the monumental gestures of carving cypress and olive, through the violent beauty of the cut. It enters the void, the cavern, the darkness of the eye. It fragments into haiku, brief notations of memory’s persistence. It ascends in spirals, unfurling like DNA or cosmic energy. It balances spheres, discovering inner orders and cosmic harmonies. Each artwork is a station in this journey, but the journey is never finished. It continues, like the olive tree that sprouts again after being carved, like the memory of the grandfather that persists in ritual.

To frame Molins’s practice as mystical is not to evacuate it of materiality. On the contrary, his sculptures are insistently material. Wood, bronze, and ink are his principal vocabularies, and he approaches each with reverence. Wood, with its growth rings and scars, is the privileged medium. Bronze, when used, is not monumental permanence but alchemical germination, as in the gilded shoot emerging from the cypress. Ink, applied to wood, is not surface decoration but the saturation of absence, the transformation of void into darkness. Each material is treated not as inert matter but as living partner. In this sense, Molins’s practice resists the modernist temptation of “medium specificity,” insisting instead on “medium dialogue.” Sculpture, for him, is not the mastery of matter but the conversation with matter.

The art-historical resonance here is striking. In the early twentieth century, Constantin Brancusi sought to strip sculpture to its archetypal essences, discovering in wood and bronze the forms of archetypes: the bird, the column, the egg.Molins, by contrast, returns to the scar, the wound, the fragment. His cypress is felled, diseased, carved. His olive tree sprouts again after being cut. If Brancusi sought the eternal through abstraction, Molins seeks the eternal through care, through memory, through the continuity of the living and the wounded. Both share the conviction that sculpture is spiritual; but where Brancusi purified, Molins remembers.

To speak of Mario Molins’s art, therefore, is to speak not of objects but of revelations. Each sculpture is an unveiling, a partial disclosure of the mystical continuum that unites human and vegetal, memory and oblivion, life and death. To encounter his work is to be reminded that the cut is not only a wound but also a renewal, that the void is not only absence but also a gaze, that the fragment is not only loss but also haiku, that the spiral is not only disorder but also DNA, that the sphere is not only geometry but also seed.

This is the framework of his practice: a spiritual itinerary rooted in personal memory and ancestral ritual, articulated through the dialogue with wood, bronze, and ink, and opened to the viewer as a journey of the soul through nature. In the sections that follow, we will trace this itinerary through the specific works that constitute its stations: the catharses of cypress and olive, the caves and darknesses, the haikus and fragments, the spirals and spheres. Each will reveal another facet of Molins’s sculptural mysticism, another revelation along the path of care and memory.

If Mario Molins’s practice is understood as a mystical itinerary, a journey of the soul through nature, then each of his works must be read as a station along this path. They are not isolated objects but revelations of different facets of the same continuum: catharsis and renewal, void and darkness, fragment and memory, spiral and ascent, sphere and order. To review them individually is not to separate them from the whole but to trace the particular inflections through which the general practice manifests itself.

Catharsis for a Cypress (2014)

This monumental work, carved from an eight-meter Portuguese cypress, is the inaugural gesture of Molins’s mature practice. It begins with death: the tree had withered in the rose garden of Zaragoza’s José Antonio Labordeta Park. Yet rather than removing the corpse, Molins transformed it into a vertical axis of mourning and transcendence. The striated trunk rises as both scar and flame, its twisted verticality reminiscent of Brancusi’s Endless Column but marked by disease and loss.

From its base emerges a gilded bronze shoot, cast directly from one of the cypress’s own branches. This addition is crucial: bronze here is not monumental permanence but alchemical germination, a metaphor for life carried forward through death. The work stages catharsis in the deepest sense: purification through suffering, renewal through loss. It is a funerary monument, but one that insists on regeneration. The cypress becomes both wound and beacon, scarred yet luminous.

Catharsis for an Olive Tree (2019)

If the cypress piece is elegiac, the olive tree carving is intimate. Executed in situ within an olive grove near Albelda, the work transforms a felled trunk into a sculptural presence that did not end with the cut. Over time, the olive tree sprouted again from its base, bore fruit, and lived on. Here, sculpture and nature fuse: the cut does not terminate life but redirects it.

This work is inseparable from Molins’s grandfather. As Alzheimer’s consumed his memory, the olive tree became the artist’s metaphor for survival. The act of pruning was transfigured into a dialogue with his grandfather’s spirit. The tree is both body and ancestor, sculpture and relative. This catharsis is therefore not only ecological but personal: a refusal of oblivion, a ritual of care. The olive tree demonstrates that sculpture, when performed as a ceremony, can keep memory alive, can nourish the spirit beyond the fragility of human consciousness.

Another Cave (2024)

The monumental catharses of cypress and olive open the itinerary, but Molins’s more recent works turn inward, toward the void. Another Cave is carved wood hollowed into a concavity and saturated with Indian ink. The result is not surface but implosion: a dark sun, an oracular cavity. The title invokes prehistory, the cave as the first sanctuary, the first theater of art. But this cave is also interior: the hollow of the body, the silence of memory, the abyss of consciousness.

Rosalind Krauss once described the grid as modernism’s emblem of anti-natural order. Molins offers another emblem: the cavity, the hollow, the negative form that structures vision. The ink-blackened void is less absence than gaze; it returns the viewer’s look, forcing introspection. In Another Cave, sculpture becomes initiation: to look into the void is to be looked at by the void.

Hidden Darkness (2019) and The Darkness of Our Eyes (2025)

These works continue the exploration of the void. In Hidden Darkness, a large wood structure cut into facets reveals an inner hollow saturated with ink. The scale suggests architecture: a passage into an unseen realm. The darkness here is not decorative but ontological: it is the darkness within vision, the limit of sight, the shadow constitutive of consciousness.

The Darkness of Our Eyes makes this explicit. Smaller in scale, it presents a concavity whose title names the paradox: we see through darkness. Vision is not pure transparency but shadowed, fractured, incomplete. Molins stages this negative theology of vision through wood and ink, reminding us that to see is always to not see, that consciousness itself is founded on absence.

Haiku of Root’s Secret (2018) and Haiku of the Spring’s Beginning (2022)

If the void works are monumental in their metaphysics, the haiku series is intimate, fragmentary, and poetic. Composed of wood fragments and Indian ink on paper or canvas, these collages present themselves as notations rather than monuments. Their scale is modest, their composition restrained, their titles insist on brevity.

The “haiku” is apt: like the Japanese poem, these works condense revelation into fragment, gesture, epiphany. They echo Alzheimer’s itself: memory fractured, continuity disrupted, meaning assembled from shards. Yet they are not only melancholic; they are also luminous. In Haiku of the Spring’s Beginning, the fragments arrange themselves into rhythm, suggesting renewal, seasonal cycle, and rebirth. In Root’s Secret, the hidden structure of growth is revealed through juxtaposition. These are not incomplete works but fragments elevated to the status of revelation.

The Life Before the Life (2025)

If the haikus fragment, The Life Before the Life, spirals. A tall wood sculpture, 140 cm high, it twists upward like DNA or embryonic energy. The title insists on anteriority: life before life, existence before birth. The spiral here is less ornament than ontology: the structure of becoming, the axis of creation.

Brancusi’s Endless Column sought transcendence through pure verticality; Molins’s spiral seeks transcendence through becoming, through process. It is not infinite extension but cyclical unfolding. The scarred wood insists that this becoming is not pure but wounded, not abstract but lived. The Life Before the Life is thus both cosmic and personal: it stages the eternal unfolding of life, but in the wounded medium of wood, the same wood that once carried the memory of his grandfather’s hands.

Inner Order (2024) and Landscape Inside – Language Outside (2019)

Balance enters Molins’s vocabulary through works such as Inner Order. Constructed from wood and ink, this cube-like arrangement balances slabs and spheres, creating an equilibrium of geometry and organic matter. The spheres, often darkened, suggest cosmic seeds or planets. The title “Inner Order” insists that harmony is not imposed from outside but discovered within. Sculpture here becomes a revelation of hidden geometry: balance as a spiritual condition.

Landscape Inside – Language Outside extends this dialogue. Composed of multiple wooden forms, it positions landscape as interiority and language as exteriority. The viewer is asked to recognize that what we call “landscape” is always internalized, that “language” is always externalized. The work dramatizes the oscillation between nature and speech, between silence and articulation. Molins here approaches the semiotic: sculpture as the place where meaning emerges from the interplay of interior and exterior.

Reviewing each of these works confirms what the framework of his practice already suggested: Molins is not a sculptor of isolated objects but of stations along a continuum. From Catharsis for a Cypress to Inner Order, from monumental voids to intimate haikus, the logic is consistent: to stage the mystical continuum of life and death, memory and oblivion, fragment and renewal. Each sculpture is a revelation, a moment along the journey of the soul through nature.

To situate Mario Molins within art history is to recognize not his kinship with a single master but his divergence from dominant sculptural traditions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Where much of modernism pursued abstraction as a path toward archetype and essence, Molins insists on memory, wound, and regeneration. Where others sought purity of form, he insists on the scar. His verticals do not ascend through polished perfection but through the twisting energy of lived matter, through the spiral that carries both pain and renewal. If others sought eternity in essence, Molins locates it in care. He does not erase the tree to find a universal form; he carves into the tree to continue a dialogue. His cypress is diseased, his olive tree sprouting anew, his voids saturated with blackened ink. These are not archetypes but lived realities, transfigured through ritual into spiritual revelations.

Molins’s originality lies in his insistence that sculpture can still be spiritual, but not in the sense of timeless archetype or abstract essence. Instead, he translates sculpture into a twenty-first-century idiom where the urgency is memory rather than archetype, resilience rather than essence, dialogue rather than abstraction. His work does not retreat into universal forms but confronts the fragility of contemporary existence: the erosion of memory in Alzheimer’s, the ecological decay of landscapes, the social forgetting that marks our age. In his hands, sculpture is not essence revealed but wound healed, not pure form but lived testimony, not monument but ceremony.

Within the contemporary art landscape, Molins stands apart from dominant tendencies. Much current sculpture aligns itself with digital fabrication, spectacle, or ironic commentary. Installations fill spaces with immersive effects, yet often leave little residue of meaning. Against this backdrop, Molins offers a radically different proposition: sculpture as ceremony, as dialogue with matter, as spiritual revelation.

This is not to suggest that Molins withdraws from contemporary concerns. On the contrary, his works engage directly with the urgencies of our time. What distinguishes his practice is its coherence: every sculpture is inscribed within the continuum of pruning, memory, and nature. He does not borrow natural forms as surfaces; he engages them as partners. He does not stage nature as a backdrop; he reveals nature as an interlocutor. In this way, his art demonstrates a rare integrity, remaining true to its origins while speaking with profound relevance to the present.

In this sense, Molins occupies a singular niche in contemporary sculpture. He is both deeply local, rooted in the olive groves and ancestral rituals of Aragón and universally resonant, addressing questions of memory, resilience, and spiritual continuity that exceed geography. His art resists globalization’s flattening by affirming rootedness, but it does so in a language of profound contemporary relevance.

Why does Molins’s art matter for society today? Because it offers a model of how art can resist oblivion. In an age where memory is eroded not only by disease but by digital acceleration, by the constant turnover of images, Molins’s insistence on ritual continuity is radical. His transformation of his grandfather’s Alzheimer’s into a dialogue with an olive tree is more than personal therapy; it is a social allegory. It demonstrates that memory can be cared for through ritual, that forgetting can be resisted through dialogue with nature.

Furthermore, his art matters ecologically. At a time of climate crisis, where trees are felled and landscapes depleted, Molins’s works insist on the resilience of nature. The olive tree that sprouts after carving, the cypress that carries a gilded shoot, the sculptures that integrate bronze sprouts and wooden scars, these are not merely aesthetic gestures. They are affirmations of nature’s ability to regenerate, provided we engage it with care. Sculpture here becomes ecological testimony: art as ritual of survival.

Finally, his art matters spiritually. In a secularized age, where rituals have been eroded and transcendence is often mocked, Molins restores sculpture as prayer. His works are not religious in a doctrinal sense, but they are sacred in their insistence on continuity, on care, on the possibility of dialogue with the invisible. They awaken in the viewer not only the senses but the soul. They remind us that art can still offer a passage to the mystical, that sculpture can still be revelation.

Mario Molins’s artistic practice must be understood not as the production of objects but as the unfolding of a spiritual itinerary. Rooted in the ancestral act of pruning, transfigured through the personal story of his grandfather, articulated in wood, bronze, and ink, his sculptures reveal the mystical continuum that unites memory and oblivion, wound and renewal, life and death.

Each work reviewed here is a station in this journey: the cathartic monuments of Cypress and Olive, the voids of Another Cave and Hidden Darkness, the retinal abyss of The Darkness of Our Eyes, the fragmentary haikus, the spiraling ascent of The Life Before the Life, the balancing geometries of Inner Order and Landscape Inside – Language Outside. Together they compose not a series of isolated objects but a coherent path: the journey of the soul through nature.

In situating Mario Molins within the contemporary art scene, we see his singularity: a sculptor who resists spectacle to insist on ceremony, who resists acceleration to insist on continuity, who resists oblivion to insist on memory. His conviction that sculpture can still be spiritual is translated into forms that privilege wound over perfection, memory over erasure, resilience over fragility. The originality of his practice lies in its refusal of superficiality, insisting instead on the deeper rhythm of ritual and the dialogue with nature.

Why is his art important for society? Because it models how art can still be ritual, how sculpture can still heal, how the act of pruning, a cut that wounds but renews, can teach us to care for memory, for nature, for one another.

To encounter Mario Molins’s work is to experience sculpture not as an object but as a prayer. It is to recognize that art can still be sacred, that it can still offer a journey of the soul through nature. And it is to be remembered that in the scar, in the void, in the fragment, in the spiral, in the balance, there is always continuity, resilience, and renewal.

By Marta Puig

Editor Contemporary Art Curator Magazine