Carmen Calvo

(Valencia, 1950)

Musical Series

1985

mixed media, collage, gouache, clay

38 x 70 cm

Inv. no. 5106

BBVA Collection Spain


Thanks to the considerable experience she has accrued in ceramics, an industry with a long deep-rooted tradition in her hometown of Valencia, Carmen Calvo is able to bring a whole range of nuances to plaster and clay, both fired and unfired.

As she says herself, the clay forms in her works operate almost like “fossilised brushstrokes”. Elongated, and often executed in soft and natural tones reminiscent of the region of Valencia, they somehow mimic the marks of a paintbrush. The small figures are fixed to the support with threads or wire, arranged rhythmically to simulate an archaeological reading which endeavours to rebuild, organise and speak about a time now past.

In this object-piece, Musical Series, these multiform gestures in clay bring to mind the characters of ancient alphabets. The variety of figures and dots scattered over the fan look like musical notations and seem to evoke counterpointed polyphonies created out of figures that inspire both rising and falling cadences.

This fan is one of the two objects intervened by Carmen Calvo which were presented at Otros abanicos (Sala de Exposiciones Banco Exterior, 1985), a group show curated by Natacha Seseña and produced by Fundación Banco Exterior, in which 29 artists were given absolute freedom to decorate fans, both large and small, folding and fixed. In 1988 the exhibition travelled to the Spanish Institute in New York and in 1990 to Palacete del Embarcadero in the port of Santander. In the catalogue, images of the pieces on show were accompanied with texts commissioned to Francisco Umbral, Camilo José Cela, Antonio Gala and Elisa de Rojas, among others.

In the exhibition catalogue, this piece was accompanied by a text by Rosa Chacel examining the act of painting a fan and the materialisation of the invisible atmospheric phenomenon of the wind, arguing that decorating a fan could be equated with painting something as evanescent as the breeze.