05th July 2022
Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani de Palma presents «Albert Pinya and Català Roig. Combustion Chamber», an exhibition created by artist Albert Pinya (b. Palma, 1985) and potter Català Roig (b. Palma, 1973) in which these two artist’s creative processes are interwoven to make an installation that sets out to take the combination of two media to the limit of their expressive possibilities.
The project, curated by Mercedes Estarellas, opens to the public on Thursday 7 July at 7 p.m. and can be visited in Es Baluard Museu’s Exhibition Hall D from 8 July until 9 October 2022. In addition, the Museum organises an exclusive visit for Amics de Es Baluard with the artists and the curator on 7 July at 6 pm.
In “Combustion Chamber” a set of 16 pieces of different sizes is shown, some of them monumental, totemic, evoking Chinese ceramics or Dutch and Portuguese porcelain. The white clay is covered with symbols, schematic, primitive forms and vindicative slogans painted in intense blue, alluding to the Mediterranean roots of both artists.
The installation also includes an unpublished sound piece by José Vives and Xavier Barberà, inspired by the creative process of Pinya and Català Roig, in which the sound of the studio, the ceramics and the countryside where they worked can be heard.
The exhibition, therefore, configures an immersive experience that reflects these two artists’ reaction to the techno-barbarism into which the digital revolution is dragging us, and the need to survive the avalanche of mass-produced trends, stimuli and passing fashions.
Abandoning the hierarchies that relegated pottery to craft status, Català Roig and Pinya manage to transcend conceptually to proclaim real values like manufacture, distinctiveness, identity, memory and territory.
