About Me

I’m Emili Solé. I’ve been sculpting since 1984, with more than 40 years of professional dedication to this craft.
If you’ve landed here after seeing a piece, it’s natural to wonder why I made it this way—and how I build it. That’s what I want to share with you.

How I work: from research to form

Before I touch the material, I need to fully understand what I’m about to sculpt. I spend a lot of time reading, documenting, and organizing information; from that, a fairly precise mental image of the figure or scene takes shape. Without this first step, I feel like I’d be improvising without a clear direction.

A “classical” foundation that’s still useful today

My training at the Faculty of Fine Arts was thoroughly classical. In sculptural processes I learned and practiced techniques that were known and used at the time: clay modeling, making waste molds, plaster reproductions, transferring to marble or wood using the pointing system, and bronze casting with the lost-wax technique.

That foundation lets me work with form and volume with clear judgment—whatever the support or material.

What you don’t see—but what holds a piece together

In Fine Arts you don’t just learn to “work with clay.” There’s also drawing, artistic anatomy, art history, composition, and reflection on visual language.

Spending years studying all of that wasn’t an academic ornament: it gave me solid tools to decide proportions, rhythms, visual weight, lines of force, and relationships between figures.

The elements of visual perception are studied and taught: how the eye moves through an image, what creates balance or tension, how a clear hierarchy is built between what’s primary and what’s secondary.

When a serious art critic evaluates two works without knowing who made them, that’s exactly what they rely on: the strength of the composition, the consistency of the style, the credibility of the gesture, and how the whole is articulated—beyond the artist’s name.

Art isn’t an exact science, but it isn’t an arbitrary lottery either.

New tools, same standards

Over the years, new resources have arrived: silicone molds, epoxy resins, fiberglass, professional modeling clays (oil-based, very different from school clay), and more recently 3D modeling.

I don’t have a “favorite” material: I choose the technique based on what the piece needs, and on how it will be presented or reproduced.

A life-size work: Holy Week procession sculptures

Some of my most visible works aren’t small nativity figures, but life-size sculptural groups: Holy Week procession sculptures.
A paso is a sculptural group depicting a scene from the Passion, Death, or Resurrection of Jesus Christ, carried through the streets in procession during Holy Week.

Two of these works are part of the Holy Burial Procession in Tarragona:
● The Last Supper (1995), made for the Seafarers’ Guild.
● Ecce Homo (1994), for the brotherhood of the same name.

In the procession, The Last Supper shows the twelve apostles gathered around the table, and Ecce Homo depicts the moment when Pilate presents Jesus to the people with the words “Behold the man.”

From a sculptor’s point of view, these works bring together many of the ideas on this page: prior research, composition, anatomy, visual rhythm, relationships between figures, and control of volume at a monumental scale.

The process begins with clay modeling and the making of waste molds; from there, some parts are resolved in wood carving and others in fiberglass, finishing with polychromy—the painted surface that brings each figure to life within the group.

In the video you can see how these sculptures live beyond the studio: moving through the streets, accompanied by brotherhoods and marching bands, and woven into a tradition shared by many people.