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ハビエル デル クエト

Javier DEL CUETO

メキシコ

I have been involved with ceramics since 1978 when I went to study at Manises School in Valencia, Spain. After more than forty years working with clay I am convinced that it is the ideal material to make sculpture, the most versatile, the most complete.

Clay can be modeled like playdough or plaster; it can be carved like stone or wood; it can be assembled, casted or poured like metal, without ever loosing it´s condition. In addition, clay can be throwed in the potter’s wheel like no other material, and this is one of its main qualities. I've always been fascinated by the potter’s wheel, that machine to generate shapes. As the Japanese master Shoji Hamada said: “I created my forms around the emptiness”.

The way in which clay behaves before being turned in the potter´s wheel, makes it a unique and irreplaceable material. Moreover, the changes that clay experiments with the action of fire are always surprising. Being a ductile and malleable material clay becomes one of the hardest and toughest materials over time. If sculpture is the art of transformation, then, What better material to make sculptures than clay?

My ceramic sculpture has undergone a long process of influences and changes, from my earliest works influenced by the Basque sculpture School (Chillida, Oteiza), the presence of pre-Columbian ceramics and the undeniable influence of Japanese ceramics: from Bizen's rustic ceramics to Shoji Hamada himself.

It is in past twenty years that I think I have come to have a voice of my own in the art of ceramics, a voice that is the compendium of all these influences, daily work at the workshop, knowledge and understanding of my material: the fired clay.

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