Take a piece of clay and knead it to remove the bubbles,

press the power button and select the eco-mode

make an elongated cylinder and place it in the shape of a circle,

with a sharp blow remove the vacuum,

scratch the surfaces you want to join,

Attention! Before you start, please read the user manual.

Now check the regularity of the obtained shape.

La forma óptima (The optimal shape) is articulated through a series of procedural choices. These revolve around ideas about human gesture, the relationships between bodies and objects and the way in which these are established. Each is enveloped and enveloping, objects and subjects withdraw. The folding and entanglement is, in fact, learned and taught. The world is revealed through the body and our existence and experience appear on this seemingly immovable border of dialogue between the self and the other. Time and effort are presented as the conceptual axis, the new tools have been reducing these two elements through their intricate and complex anatomies.

I come to understand during the production that what interests me are the times intrinsic to the processes and how they are consumed, and also what this has to do with human gestural theatre, which is why the idea of automation and machine is present, of a tool after all. I modify, change and take advantage of the very material nature of things in a kind of qualitative game that branches out in its different modalities, the selection of an existing image and the distortion of this, the focus on something concrete, the search for something tangible or the exercise of dialogue and stacking.

The graphite drawings entitled "Interval of free time" allude to images from instruction booklets in which the object disappears to make room for the arrows and numbers that will later serve to help us understand their structures and how they work. The time saved is freed up and is now presented in a methodical and repetitive work. In another type of instructions, such as those in the book of ceramic techniques that I scan and expand, the body and the clay become the same thing, they are composed of the same type of materiality that is practically dematerialised when presented sublimated on the silk that serves as a support. In "Landscapes" the selective gaze is repeated, the muds of different colours are combined and passed through a press that produces the forms and spots of colour, then isolated in the search for a referentiality to which to adhere. I think that the allusion to the great pictorial genres appears as the need to allude to something, but perhaps it is only an excuse for the collaborative work between me and this machine.

Sculptural constructions are dialogues between bodies and objects. There is something inherently anthropomorphic in ceramics and in its vessel form. The mouths, necks and arms are produced to make contact with the canning jars that populate supermarkets and with pieces printed in saturated colours. It is all fragility and is kept in balance. The industrial and accelerated times are opposed to the artisanal, slow and reflexive times, and on the same plane, these plastic pieces are a deception with regard to their production and appear to be deceptive, appearing to be fast, being constructed, in reality, through a process of accumulated layers that is surprisingly slow and reminds me of working with clay churros in the workshop.

The word optimisation gives the title to this exhibition and I find that it is the word that governs our way of being here and living in the contextual present. On the other hand, I see in the word "form" an interesting polysemy, towards volume, structure or silhouette, but also as a synonym for manner, mode or procedure.

Mar Ramón

April 2021

Mar Ramón (Valencia, 1993). She lives in Niñodaguia, Ourense, a village with a pottery tradition, and is studying for a PhD in Fine Arts at the University of Vigo.

She has had solo exhibitions at the Granell Foundation in Santiago de Compostela and the Marcos Valcárcel Centre in Ourense; among the latest group exhibitions, currently in progress, are: "Afinidades Selectivas (Mar Ramón+Julia Huete). Carótidas y Coronarias", Casa Galega de Cultura, Vigo, curated by Juan Carlos Román and "Cultivar incertezas: Reformular el espacio/Conmocionar la mirada". CGAC, Santiago de Compostela, curated by Ángel Cerviño.

He has also participated in various competitions and has received awards such as the Novos Valores 2020, the Puenting Award for production Mustang Art Gallery and University of Altea 2020, the Injuve Award for Young Creation 2017-18 and several editions of the Xuventude Crea Award.