Kantharos

Alfredo Rodríguez, Carlos Fernández-Pello, Casa Josephine, Eduardo Sarabia, Fernando Renes, Joel Blanco, Julia Llerena, Little, Los Bravú, Lucas Marcos, Lucas Muñoz, Luis Pérez Calvo, Marta Fernández-Calvo, Mateo Maté, Miguel B., Miki Leal, Miquel Barceló, Pablo Barreiro, Shozo Michikawa, Xavier Monsalvatje.\n\nKANTHAROS\nThe forms of artistic production have been altered by the irruption of new technologies, modifying the way in which the artist confronts their work. All this leads to a rethinking of formal questions, taking as a starting point a reflection on the object, its meaning, materiality, and the mode of its production.\nAnd it is in this moment of continuous acceleration that the idea of "Kantharos" is born. The exhibition aims to produce a descent in the rhythm of creation of the participating artists, to pose to them the necessity of generating an element that connects us with our most ancestral past: a vessel, a jar, ultimately an element with the capacity to contain, to house, to embrace. From the need to see how twenty-two artists from the same sociocultural panorama confront such a simple problem, one that can nevertheless be so poetic and rich as to merit an exhibition.\nCERAMICS: UTILITY AND ART\nCeramic productions are one of humanity's most ancient creations, arising from the domestic necessities of populations until recent times. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, their utilitarianism has gradually given way to artistic and aesthetic purposes. Not that aesthetics and artistic expression were alien to these elements of humanity's material culture, present in all cultures, but the utilitarian would predominate in their fabrication.\nHowever, the first objects modeled in clay were documented in the Gravettian period, in the Upper Paleolithic, and were related to the sacred. They were small representations of Mother Goddesses, like the Venus of Dolní Věstonice, dated between 29,000 and 25,000 B.C.\nNevertheless, the great ceramic efflorescence occurs during the Neolithic (6,000 B.C. to 3,000 B.C.), a product of the appearance of agricultural and livestock societies replacing hunter-gatherer ones. As receptacles were necessary to store the surplus of harvests and livestock products, a wide range of pieces of diverse sizes and purposes was produced. It is hand-made ceramics, with varied decorations, such as impressed and cardial pottery, typically Mediterranean whose impression was made with the shell of a cockle.\nCeramic production extends through the periods of the Bronze and Iron Ages, in which the Phoenicians introduce the potter's wheel to the Iberian Peninsula. A revolution occurs and wheel-thrown and painted ceramics with decorative motifs of diverse meanings appear in the Iberian and Celtiberian world. Here we could distinguish between ceramics and pottery, the former including all fabrication techniques employing clay, and pottery, the technique for manufacturing ceramic objects on a wheel or rotating disc.\n\nVALVERDE +1: KANTHAROS\nA project of Espacio Valverde and Galería SEISMASUNO.\nIt was in Athens that the term keramiké (ceramics) was employed for these productions, with magnificent examples of black-figure and red-figure ceramics, exported to the entire Mediterranean sphere. Rome would influence these fabrications with its terrae sigillatae or sealed ceramics, spread throughout the Roman Empire.\nDuring the Middle Ages prototypes vary, with ceramic production heavily influenced by Moorish techniques, such as the ceramics of Teruel, Paterna, and above all the lusterware of Manises. With the arrival of the Renaissance, magnificent ceramics are produced in Spain, in the novel kilns of Talavera de la Reina, author of tricolor and polychrome ceramics, and Puente del Arzobispo (Toledo), in which the Moorish wheel was employed in the latter, characterized by the lower wheel or flywheel set in the subsoil. At present, the Ruiz de Luna Ceramics Museum of Talavera de la Reina preserves ancient productions and those from Guijo and Ruiz de Luna, already in the twentieth century.\nThey were two marvelous examples of Spanish production, replaced in the eighteenth century by that of the Count of Aranda in his villa of Alcora (Castellón), from 1727 to 1858. He wanted to achieve more luxurious pieces for the decoration of new palaces and achieved hard-paste porcelain. This was something coveted by all European courts after the discovery of the first hard porcelain produced in Europe, in Meissen (Saxony) by Böttger. It was not simple, although since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries pieces of these characteristics were available, but their fabrication was unknown, because in the world of Chinese and Japanese porcelains profound secrecy prevailed. Since then, and under the patronage of European kings, manufactories arose such as La Moncloa (Madrid), inspired by French forms and English decorative currents of stamping; Sèvres, Vienna, Capodimonte, and Buen Retiro, among others.\nThroughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, earthenware productions continued from the Cartuja of Seville, by the Marquis of Pickman; from Triana; the tricolor series of Úbeda (Jaén); Sargadelos (Galicia); or Valdemorillo (Madrid) which supplied the Royal House in the time of Alfonso XIII, among others. We could speak of many other ceramic producing houses, but the dynamism was so great that it would be prolix to do so in the brief space of these pages.\nIn this exhibition, which we contemplate today, we can have the privilege of knowing very singular pieces, some ancient and the majority products of the most contemporary ceramic art. It is a great responsibility for their authors to present these examples that inform us about the forms of the pieces themselves, of the intrinsic creativity, of the relentless struggle with matter, but also of the society in which we live which, like all previous ones, is deeply involved with contemporary art.\nJulio González Alcalde, PhD in Geography and History, Curator of the National Museum of Natural Sciences