ON THE TABLE
File
A project by Isidro Blasco
Virginia Frieyro
Montserrat Gómez Osuna
Din Matamoro
Teresa Moro
Sandra Rein
Luis Salaberría
On the Table brings together a series of ceramics, designed by Isidro Blasco and made in traditional ovens, on which six artists have intervened. It is an ongoing project that launched with The Table Project in 2020.
ON THE TABLE derives from Isidro Blasco’s The Table Project. The artist launched The Table Project in 2020, on his return from New York. It emerged from his reencounter with the craft tradition that he had grown up in and the work of his parents, the ceramists Arcadio Blasco and Carmen Perujo, who founded the legendary “La Mina” workshop in Majadahonda back in the sixties.
The idea behind the first exhibition was to reproduce some original table designs from the fifties, with the aim of fitting out the Arcadio Blasco House-Workshop studio in Mutxamel (Alacant, Spain) and thereby preserving its legacy. During progress on the project, the enormous potential of traditional ceramic design and production processes in relation to more contemporary works became evident. Thus, The Table Project turned into a meeting point for different artists, who reinterpreted the original designs and produced their own pieces.
ON THE TABLE rbrings a group of artists together once again around the theme of ceramics, this time taking pottery as its starting point. Shapes designed by Isidro Blasco and turned by Juan Carlos Fernández – a potter from Puente del Arzobispo who belongs to the 6th generation of artisans – provide the best blank canvas, a series of differently shaped and sized ceramics fired at a temperature of 1,000ºC and finished with transparent and opaque glazes, ready for each artist to act on.
Virginia Frieyro, Montserrat Gómez Osuna, Din Matamoro, Teresa Moro, Sandra Rein and Luis Salaberría have worked on a variety of ceramic formats, interpreting them to create their own collections.
The installation in MARCO’s A3 Gallery reflects the project’s origins by including several wooden structures at the end of the gallery functioning as displays for the ceramics and at the same time being copies of similar ones built by Arcadio Blasco in the fifties.
Artists
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Virginia Frieyro experiments by interweaving abstraction, colour and repetition on the surface of the ceramics. In her pieces she explores the use of colour as a framework. She seeks to reveal emotions in art, to connect with the most intimate side, for that is the place where art is sparked.
Gómez Osuna creates landscapes in her works that feature roughly-defined vegetable elements and organic ornaments interspersed with figurative details. Familiar domestic objects, such as plates and whole piles of pots and pans, crop up to form drawings reminiscent of a classic still-life.
Din Matamoro
Din Matamoro slides the paintbrush across the pale-skinned, smooth, cold, ceramic surface in a single stroke like a hand dancing over a sheet of paper. A naked, black-coloured line wanders through the void, sometimes leaving a glowing colour-trail behind. It traces a curve and suddenly a depiction appears. Economy of means. A synthesis of memory that began as contemplation.
Teresa Moro explores Modernist authors in her work undertaking to review them in search of details, dissimilarities and areas of special vibration. The artist contributes her grain of sand to resist the unstoppable tide of standardization that consumer society imposes on our habitats.
Sandra Rein’s pieces take inspiration mainly from the style of decorative arts movements like “Arts and Crafts”, which had spread across Europe at the end of the nineteenth century before becoming well-established in the twentieth century. Based on geometric variations, her elegant designs produce ceramic pieces possessing a great harmony of colour and form.
Salaberría’s work is grounded in popular tradition and takes advantage of an open approach, playing with analogies and employing “primeval” images and archetypes, while also fully exploiting mistakes and the unexpected. The finished ceramics feature fantasy images and characters which could end up transporting us to our childhood stories.
