VALENCIA.- This exhibition, From Integrations to the emotivity of reason, presents half a century – 1957–2008 – of the work that Salvador Soria has devoted to his investigations on the theme of Integraciones (Integrations) and to his sculptures Máquinas para el espíritu (Machines for the Spirit).

These visual utterances blend together and nourish one another, animating each other in a kind of natural progression in which themes follow in succession like stages of a long journey.

“Salvador Soria is unquestionably one of the artists who has done most to establish the position and dignity of Spanish post-war art.

This can be stated for reasons not subject to dispute: for the exemplary cohesion of his evolution, for the particular, individualized nature of his images, for the special quality of his technique and the meaningfulness of his working methods. These clear and forceful assertions made by Vicente Aguilera Cerni underline the historical importance and significance of Salvador Soria in the context of our artistic renewal […] work that is hard to classify because of its felicitous heterodoxy in comparison with the usual canon. Self-critical, demanding, mature, sober, ethical […] Reducing the antitheses of complexity and simplicity, process and contrast, nonconformity and temporality. And conscious of its social vocation, for, as Salvador Soria says, “if art is sincere it is always a reflection of experiences that serve the collective”.

"In this selection we see progress along a path in which various materials are used, ranging from the well-known metal filings, charred wood and pieces of cardboard used to make collages to the drawings of the last five years. In these most recent works we find a greater tendency to the constructive within the duality existing in my Integraciones. We might speak of a justification of the subconscious resulting from the long period devoted to resolving the technical problem of the Máquinas para el espíritu. This duality is implicit and accentuated in these works, which I have called Emotividad de la razón (Emotivity of Reason). If we pause to consider this long period in which factors from the sculptures intervene in the integrations, whose spaces, volumes and colours are present in the Máquinas para el espíritu, there is a multivalent unity that we find throughout my career," said the artist.

Salvador Soria bears witness to some seventy years of artistic experimentation pervaded by tendencies bound up with history and cultural movements which reached their culmination in a combination of explorations of form, matter and space which he has tirelessly pursued.