Ramón P. Cuyàs
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Symbolic Exchanges
Retrospective exhibition of outstanding Spanish artist, lecturer, curator of exhibitions, at present Head of the Jewellery Department of the Escola Massana Jewellery School in Barcelona. It shows goldsmith transformations of author, which are an effect of over twenty years artistic work and the unchanging inspiration with the culture and the Mediterranean landscape.
Creation is an act between two people. From my side it ends up at the point at which I don’t transform it any more. But a creative act may start again, through the creative eye of the spectator, who may somehow recreate, continuing that creative act. Following this way, the creation ends up where I finish the piece, but will continue through the viewer look. There the viewer is playing, giving a different meaning to the piece.
Ramón Puig Cuyàs
Ramón travelling experiences reflexive. He absorbed his own culture, reusing memories to make projects. Therefore he plays between past and present, in order to propose new futures. He inherited a composite culture, a network of contacts that were established centuries ago along the Mediterranean basin.
Ramón Puig Cuyàs is the embodiment of the Catalan spirit and his jewellery circles around symbols and metaphors. They are marked both by abstraction and reality, a lot of ideas are expressed with the use of a pictorial shortcut. Ramon’s favourite type of jewellery is the brooch, in which an intimate still life takes on a dimension of the cosmic landscape, a secret garden, opening before us the boundlessness of sky and seas. Ramón loves light gestures and tragedy is not part of his character. His jewellery does not express subjectiveness, but is rather the essence of ordinary nature, the evidence of which he records as a chronicler, spinning individual reflections over them. At work he uses materials which he considers to be “seemingly ordinary”. These are different kinds of finds: colourful pebbles, glass, gravel, wood, paper, plastics, which we most often ignore. However, Ramón turns to them eagerly, deliberately using their fragments, pieces, in his works. His world seems to be fragmentary and smashed, but is it really so? Doesn’t each generation try to find a new meaning in the relics of the past? Ramon is not dramatic, instead he bonds and conceives new utopias, which are directed to other people. His jewellery expresses both reflection and communication.
Rüdiger Joppien
Above all, what one can notice in all of Ramón jewels – until the last one he made – is that between him and Miró there are several related ways of reasoning and feeling. This is underlined by a common way of surrender to the creative act, to dialogues with the matter. Their working process suggests spontaneous gestures while working, in creative acts that don’t have any previous studies, like in a process of reasoning with the hands. As global actor and representative artist, Ramón poiesis and his travelling working experience are impregnated by his identity. His work is reflexive, independent and free, showing a discourse that raises intense and emotional relationships and feelings of belonging to the Mediterranean world.
Ana Campos
About the artist:
Born in 1953 in Spain. Education: Massana School, Barcelona, 1969-74. Since 1977 professor at Escola Massana, Head of the Jewellery Department. Since 1998 visiting lecturer at several universities and schools. Lecturer at ESAD, Escola Superior de Artes e Design, Portugal, 2003; Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn, 2007; South Carelia Polytechnic, Lappeenranta, Finland, 2008; School of Jewellery Birmingham Institute of Art & Design, Great Britain, 2009. Many times awarded. His works have been presented at several dozen group exhibitions all over the world and are part of over twenty major public and private collections all over the world.
