Ramon Puig Cuyàs, Silvia Walz & Kim Buck

Artist list

Kim Buck, Ramon Puig Cuyàs, Silvia Walz

Jewellery has always been connected to vitality, claims Ramon Puig Cuyàs, who along with his partner Silvia Walz are the next international guests at Kim Buck’s gallery. The jewellery they have made for the exhibition also has life-asserting symbolism and a recognisable use of materials on offer. From their combined workshop and home in Vilanova i la Geltrú, a town slightly south of Barcelona, they can look out across the Mediterranean. On their walks along the beach they have found pieces of plastic that have given new life to some of their brooches. Kim Buck has also taken recycling as his point of departure, but his raw material has been beer cans bought in Germany. They don’t pay back your deposit in Denmark, so the alternative was to throw them away.
 
Choosing materials other would call rubbish is widespread in contemporary art. Being able with the aid of the category of art to transform something transitory and worthless into something lasting and valuable has a touch of magic about it. Not unjustifiably, the recycling artist has been compared with the alchemist who attempted in the Middle Ages to make gold out of materials of lesser value. Both seek via this transformation process to attain a higher end - to create something that points beyond the physical and the material. The upgrading in status and value which such an artistic transformation involves has even give rise to a new word in English: ‘upcycling’.
 
 
Ramon Puig Cuyàs had given the title Antarctica to one of his series of brooches. Angular white and blue fragments form formations that are reminiscent of ice floes, and the title links the shapes to the most deserted snow and ice landscape on the planet. In this type of landscape, a special stillness prevails, and at a superior, symbolic level Cuyàs is interested in getting such jewellery to convey the stillness that can open up a meeting with one’s inner self.

 
Light as a phenomenon is the common denominator for Silvia Walz’s brooches. Light means emotions, and the colour and strength influences one’s frame of mind and mood. In the series Porta-skies she has tried to capture the transience of the changing experiences of light that clouds create as they move across the sky. As wearable brooches they can be used as amulets in dark and windowless rooms when one needs a reminder of what exists outside.
 
Each of Kim Buck’s necklaces has been made from the material of one beer can, or what is left of it after it has been melted down and impurities removed. The alloy is almost pure aluminium, and interestingly enough Buck started his career in the 1980s by making jewellery of aluminium. Aesthetically speaking, there is however little that reminds one of his earlier jewellery except the sense of making series that have formal variations.
 
The recycling system, which is quite a simple system that ensures that materials are recycled, breaks down when you cross borders. The good intension does not survive a border crossing. Buck use beer cans as a symbol of all the other good intentions, that in recent years, crashes when you cross the borders in Europe.

 
This is the fourth time that Kim Buck invites two international colleagues to exhibit with him in the gallery he has set up wall-to-wall with the workshop and shop he has at Rådhusstræde 10 in Copenhagen. The Spaniard Ramon Puig Cuyàs (b. 1953) and the German Silvia Walz (b. 1965) are both active as artists and instructors. Ramon Puig Cuyàs has led the jewellery department at Massana School in Barcelona since 1979, where Silvia Walz also teaches. With The most secret gallery Kim Buck has wanted to create a platform for showing and discussing international contemporary jewellery.