SHAPING COLOURS
24.01.2020 – 29.02.2020
Exhibition by Carme Collell
Opening, Friday 24th January at 8 pm
in ACVIC. Centre d'Arts Contemporànies
Entering an artist's studio is much the same thing as satisfying some kind of curiosity. We enter with the desire to understand something new and different. The workshop is a separate world, an unknown environment, full of small clues that allow us to divert, for a while, from what is everyday and normative. The studio is also the space for dialogue and discovery.
Finding yourself in the workshop of Carme Collell is to immerse yourself a new landscape, in which the dimensions of objects are delimited by a concrete, precise and harmonious canon. A landscape in which the suggestion of a rose or a volcano can materialise in forms of identical size.
In Carme's work there is a mutual dependency between ceramics and painting. Although the pieces are not without the demands of ceramics, we cannot disassociate them from the painting because one cannot be understood without the another. This interaction between the two disciplines is reflected, inter alla, in a similar process of phases as in the assembling of a piece of ceramics and, in particular, in what constitutes the main strand of the work, beginning with the construction of the idea, the technical rigour, and the pictorial demands.
This approach stems from the stage of Carme's training when in the studio of her uncle painter and ceramist Josep Collell in Montevideo. It was he who developed the technique of burnished engobe, which allowed him to work on volumes without departing from the pictorial language. We find, in this approach, very suggestive similarities, ranging from the fresco mural technique, applied in small formats, obviously, to the need to approach pictorial composition on a three-dimensional support that does not avoid, which, on the contrary, encourages, the game of shapes, rhythms and spaces.
Although some of the forms clearly refer to specific objects, the diversity - and freedom - of forms allow us, as spectators, to interpret and to freely associate them with figures from our own experience. But at the same time as the aesthetic experience, these volumes are rather the architecture of a feeling, the intangible and light sensation of colour.
Text by Toni Garcia Serrat
Painter. Professor of Fine Arts and Design
Photography: Tilted blue (2019). Photography by Jordi Lafon
Carme Collell Blanco. Bachelor in Arts History in the UAB. Lecturer at Escola d´Art i Superior de Disseny de Vic from 1980 until 2011. She begins ther interest in ceramics while awarded a scholarship to study for a Master’s degree in Art and Education at New York University with ceramicist Lydia Buzio, a graduate student taught by Josep Collell, with whom she continued her tuition at his ceramics workshop in Montevideo (1979-80), Member of Acadèmia Internacional de Ceràmica (AIC-IAC) since 2009. Solo exhibitions in New York (1985-1999) and group shows in Sweden, Paris, Munich, Barcelona, Valencia, Chateauroux, Taiwan, Santa Fe (New Mexico) and Dublin.
