The exhibition La promesa de Villèlia, organized by the Museo Patio Herreriano and curated by its director, Javier Hontoria, affords a unique opportunity to revisit the figure of Moisès Villèlia, whose work has not been seen on a grand scale in a Spanish institution since his retrospective at the IVAM in 1999.

The title of the exhibition refers to an often-quoted observation by Ángel Ferrant, who was deeply impressed by the artist’s work when he discovered it in Villèlia’s exhibition at Sala Gaspar in Barcelona in 1958. By “promise”, Ferrant was referring both to the sculptor’s early talent and to the disruptive potential already evident in his first wooden works and in his explorations with roots, cork, ropes and wire. A few years later, Villèlia consolidated his long-standing relationship with bamboo cane, a material that would become the core axis of his visual language and, indeed, of this exhibition.

Within this context, the BBVA Collection is presenting Un pajarito (A Little Bird), 1980. This delicate mobile sculpture in polychrome bamboo not only embodies the essence of Villèlia’s sculptural production, characterized by lightness, organic forms and interaction with space, but also stands as a seminal key for a proper understanding of the artist’s transition toward a mode of expression in which the manipulation of material is coupled with its movement in the void. Suspended in balance, the work strikes up a poetic dialogue with the tradition of the modern mobile, while also reaffirming the sculptor’s ability to endow the material’s minimal and humble nature with great aesthetic value.