Portugal has a long history in what concerns ceramics. The countless tiles that cover homes and patrimony in Lisbon, as well as the decorative arts which reveal what was the main taste of the Portuguese nobles and elite, are a testimony to that. A taste that goes back to the famous Silk Route that brought the first Chinese ceramics and that the Portuguese admired.

Objectismo Gallery now proposes a revisit to the Aleluia ceramics – a known ceramics factory founded in 1905 in Aveiro – in a direct dialogue with the work of the artist Bruno Castro Santos. The exhibition Deriva shows how design and ceramics (produced between the 40s and 70s) encourage a new hypothesis of contemporaneity and of transdisciplinary vision in what concerns technique, art and handicraft.

The designs echo in the colourful geometries of the vases. The purity of forms, the slick graphics, the exact lines, the cutting angles and the lyric curves are present in both expressions, in a way that they really invoke periods when the vanguards blossomed and multiplied in “isms”: Orphism, Constructivism, Abstractionism, Cubism, etc.. Castro Santos, however, updates the set in a minimal cleansing, reinforces the character of a ceramics piece, as if a vase had been submitted to a geometric planning.

Deriva is on exhibition at Objectismo Gallery until October 19.