Contemporary Jewellery

Artist list

Robert Baines, Karl Fritsch,  Fritz Maierhofer, Ramon Puig Cuyás

This exhibition groups together four artists of very different initial training and types of expression, who are similar to one another only in their intense passion for colour.

The Australian Robert Baines has spent much time studying archaic Greek and Roman gold-working, using extremely sophisticated means of investigation. He uses bright red in the filigree linearity of antique models, which evolve into floral forms whose light, transparent textures then metamorphose into technological structures. He recovers the sumptuous gold decoration of granulations and filigree in rings, necklaces and bracelets in which shiny automobiles are mounted. The contemporary myth of speed, expressed in the form of its most popular icon, mingles with thousand-year-old myths in a natural stylistic continuity.

Karl Fritsch, from Germany, has only recently discovered the most exasperated forms of colour, going beyond the use of burnished or bleached metal forms, although often illuminating them with irregular scatterings of tiny gems. The pulsing contortions of his materials are accentuated by spikes of gemstones, coloured crystals, or enamels in primary colours. The aggressive polychrome and polyhedricity of these glassy volumes, roughly inserted in the flowing metal, intensify the joyous, wild anarchy of undetermined evolutions, expressed as a perennial future.

Fritz Maierhofer, from Austria, reveals his long experience as a colourist, since his early work in the 1960s, when he was concentrating on the solar spectrum, composing chromatic scales of complementary or totally dissociated colours, obtained using a plastic material, acrylic. His original structuralism, the expression of primary geometries, has recently undergone evident formal disruption, giving rise to free, irregular, almost casual configurations. The new material he uses, the plastic corian, adds weight, thickness and mass to his magmatic forms, giving the illusory appearance of white chalk, blue lapis lazuli, red coral.

The Catalan artist Ramon Puig Cuyàs, in his variegated accumulation of finds, adopted as a language of memory, finds it natural to use colour reinforced by the intervention of pure paint, which defines specific areas and highlights spatial divisions among planes. To paint, he adds enamels and acrylic pigments and, in particular, the same colours as the minimal objects he assembles - the red of coral, the white gleam of pearls and mother-of-pearl, the green of emeralds, the dark red of rubies, the grey of lava. In recent works, the artist seems to have abandoned his previous lively polychrome subjects, suitable for narrating adventurous voyages, in favour of a pause for intense contemplation: he uses brown, black and white enamels, with tiny touches of delicate tints, to trace the initiating vision of a metaphysical reality, which marks the end of his wanderings and the beginning of a new spiritual journey. 

-2016-2016