Lisa Sydney, aka Feltenstein, is a glamorous, internationally recognized astrologer with numerous media credits to her name. Based in Miami, she has been practicing astrology for a few decades and has studied with some of the greatest masters from Burma to London to Egypt, supplementing her knowledge of astrology with Eastern philosophy, the occult sciences, the Kabbalah, and ancient architecture. In addition to her media presence, she travels all over the world consulting with politicians, designers, educators, and captains of industry. As a fashion designer, trendsetter, and student of trends, her appeal as an astrologer is unparalleled. Lisa has served as a member of the board of The New World Symphony for sixteen years as well as The Children's Home Society of South Florida. Her fabulosity-meter is off the charts. The Pied à Terre meets her on a gorgeous day in her magnificent Miami home

Mythmakers and icons pervade Xavier Mascaró's life and work. A sculptor of robust, imposing, yet poignant pieces, the Spanish artist draws influences from the work of Egyptian and Grecian artists and the generations of sculptors who have come before him. Archetypes and oracles provide us with information about the meaning within our life experiences (and perhaps shape them as well); Mascaró references and manipulates both the archetypal and the prophetic in his sculpture to convey simultaneously the ephemerality and the eternality of time, place, and feeling. His work has an uncanny ability to express presence and absence, substance and void, at the same time.

Born in Paris, Xavier Mascaró received his fine arts education in Barcelona, Spain. In 1989, he created his first bronze works, moving on to sculpt with forged iron in 1995. After exhibiting in Madrid and New York, Mascaró developed an artistic discourse using the iconic forms of horses, masks, and armatures. Maletilla, a four-ton iron structure, measures more than eight feet high with a diameter of more than thirteen feet and plays with the use of moving images and music to convey the passage and flow of time, a subject that fascinates Mascaró. According to the sculptor, Maletilla depicts the actions of "expressed emotions related to childhood and nostalgia contained in a temporary construction, similar to the ones built in Spanish towns to occasionally hold bullfights."

Xavier Mascaró possesses one of the most original iconic voices in modern-day sculpture. His work is haunting in the way it reveals interiors as exterior spaces. His sculptures are often spare, yet at the same time texturally and architecturally complex, conveying the iconographic quality of medieval armor. Interior and exterior, whether elided or juxtaposed, are important concepts in his work. Myriad entry points and levels present themselves for approaching his work, among them the subtle yet rich colors, the complex and large-scale fabrication, and the meticulous, masterful artistry each piece exudes. In 2008, while walking in the Jardin du Palais Royal in Paris, I was able to observe the grays and ochres of the rusted-iron Guardians, whose imposing yet peaceful forms filled the open areas of the park's allée like an army of meditating soldiers. This large-scale public installation is Mascaró's largest work to date. Repeated in four principal cities in Spain, Guardians earned Mascaró international recognition. Describing these public works, Mascaró explains, "I love working in monumental scale. It is a pleasure to walk along the pieces and feel their overwhelming presence by my side." Carlos Saura, one of the leading figures of Spanish cinema, has said of the Guardian series, "I imagine hundreds of Guardians, perhaps thousands of them, all born of fire and wrought by the iron, lined up on the beach and assailed by rust, but still erect on their pedestals, beatifically contemplating the red evening sun."

Recently, in the wake of his return from Kenya and Spain, I met with Mascaró at one of his working studios, located on New York City's West Side in the industrial area that houses massive artists' lofts. (In his second, even larger, studio in Spain, assistants help with the casting, welding, filing, and burnishing of the bulk of his work.) Revealing his fondness for the specificity of memories and the iconographic visual images they encapsulate, Mascaró's studio is strewn with evidence of pieces in process; quick paper sketch studies, some dashed off on newsprint, are taped to the walls. All of his works in progress-black-and-white pen-and-ink drawings in sketchbooks lying near his leather armchair, sculptural works set on flat surfaces, shards of glass wrapped in metal to form new icons-resound with the imagery of Mascaró's cultural heritage. Each of his pieces seems to surge with energy, making his studio a laboratory of intense, distilled emotion and virile juxtapositions. His sketches at first glance recall improvisatory lines and loops, yet they compel with the celebratory pleasure they express.

As his sculpture so eloquently declares, time moves onward, and change is a constant. So it is for Mascaró's work: he has recently begun working in copper plate and is experimenting with combining different metals within resins. Silk screening and photography are also playing a role in his graphic work. But whatever new forms and media Mascaró's future work may employ, the finely wrought chain that links his oeuvre together will likely remain: he once commented in a conversation with art historian and curator Tomás-Llorens, "I'm fascinated and strongly affected by something that Giacometti said: 'to drag a presence from a void.' That is just what I want. To evoke a presence. If I didn't want to have this presence of form in front of me, I wouldn't be doing this-I'd be doing something else."