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lanting oneself in an industrial park on a holiday is an action that invites contemplation. The industrial park appears devoid of its usual hustle and bustle, of its ordinary functionality, and its nature as a true space emerges to the surface. At that moment, it becomes a ghost that you must look in the eyes. You can no longer pretend that you are in the house's storage room. It is a similar feeling to visiting a square on a holiday that is accustomed to having, evidently, a daily pulse. What would we understand by daily pulse? The insatiable coming and going of activity that can be concentrated in the square of a public market, a square like Soler i Carbonell in Vilanova i la Geltrú. Of ungraspably generous dimensions, it is in front of the so-called central market of the capital of Garraf. The square is a faithful mirror of the market's characteristics. I visit it on a spring holiday when it gets cool again and the laziness of the hazy sun spreads to the general calm. Today the market is closed and two pairs of children play ball at vermouth time. It should be treated as a historical and remarkable fact that it is a square where people still play ball. Specifically, two children who seem to be brothers exchange kicks. Now I pass it to you, now I bounce it against the market wall.
—"You threw them too far!" —exclaims one, while the little one bursts out laughing at the mischief he has perpetrated. A while later, this pair of brothers abandons the ball and goes to rest under the platform of the sculpture in the middle of the square. It is a rusted iron pedestal. Perhaps it measures more than a meter. They have had to make an effort to climb onto it. In fact, this square block, taller than the previous one, was placed under the sculpture in May 2005. Five years earlier, an accident had sent one of the two figures that make up the sculptural group, Home i Dona (Man and Woman), to the ground: two empty bronze figures that aim to draw the profiles of bodies, as if they were a mask. Due to a truck's impact, the man's foreshortening broke.
However, the title of the work and the name of its author, the Vilanova sculptor Xavier Cuenca, are things that the visitor will be left wanting to know, as there is no inscription on the artistic ensemble that reveals any of these significant details. There are other inscriptions, though; scribbles written with white correction fluid or scratched onto the iron: "Carlasalillas", "Raul BK", "Migordito", "Nava"... Names that tell us nothing and are often accompanied by hearts. An iconography that, despite its expressive primitivism, reflects the ups and downs of life, of a story begun, of another interrupted. What will have become of "Migordito" or his infatuation with a Carla with four 'a's? The children resting on the cubicle and next to the bronze man and woman who do not manage to touch or intertwine —they have no arms, no face—, observe a child playing with a rubber ball with his grandfather. The grandfather seems quite agile for his suspected age and controls his incipient belly and the untamed ball well. The child laughs and whines, both at the same time, when the grandfather hides the ball from him too much.
The pedestal of the sculpture seems to radiate rectangular order towards the four corners of the square, like a pyramid located in the center of the universe. Perhaps, looking closely, it is the market and its rigorously rationalist forms that display this rectilinear radiation: the enormity of the square —of this fine cement that burns if you kneel on it, a cement from an old school sports track—, appears divided into plots. Fine tiles draw everything with rectangles, like small parking spaces. That is what gives it the air of giant tablecloths spread out to celebrate a concert, the weekly market, or a massive xatonada. It seems that the market building, like a cyclops giving its first morning yawn, has spread the tablecloths of the square. The lines and right angles mark the personality of the market building. Begun in 1935 and finished in 1941, it meticulously follows, like a diligent student, the aesthetic criteria of rationalism, with a maximum sense of functionality expressed in the lateral cantilevers and only allowing itself the ornament of some greenish trim on each side. It is that rationalism that you don't know if it is the work of a communist quinquennium or of a profound modernity. The architect who designed it, Josep Maria Miró i Guibernau, also conceived the classical-style building that stands out, at the back of the square, as one of the oldest: the Pompeu Fabra school —the name of the language computer fits wonderfully in this environment—. The atmospheric rationality should not make one forget the difficulties at the beginning of the market's construction due to the lack of resources. In any case, the land to build it was obtained precisely thanks to the testamentary legacy of Mr. Soler i Carbonell.
By sharpening one's gaze, one always finds forms that break the straight line. It could have been the roundabout in the central part of the square, but this one is precisely pyramidal. However, among the four types of lampposts scattered around the square —from typical industrial estate lights to identical posts everywhere— there are some with round balls, very much from the eighties. And there are also the two children who have already come down from the sculpture to kick the ball again.