Pere Noguera, poet of clay and matter

La Bisbal de EmpordàPere Noguera (La Bisbal d'Empordà, 1941) is one of the most solid and genuine voices of contemporary Catalan art. Capital exponent of thearte povera and the land art, has built over more than fifty years of experience a body of work faithful to humble materials, such as water, clay, and iron, always deploying a poetic discourse on matter, memory, identity, landscape, and the passage of time. Deeply rooted in his hometown, the capital of the Catalan pottery tradition, Noguera, the exhibition-installation Landscape. Clay Pulse, which can be visited until October 26.

The exhibition is part of the Pere Noguera Year, a collective initiative that tours various cultural spaces in the country to vindicate the artist's uniqueness and diversity. The cycle began at the Filmoteca de Catalunya with an exhibition of the audiovisual production of the creator, a pioneer in the incorporation of photocopying, archiving, ready-made and the film footage. The year continues with a new exhibition at the Vila Casas Foundation in Palafrugell and will end at the Bòlit Centre for Contemporary Art in Girona with a retrospective in June.

Noguera is famous for the muddy, who cover everyday objects such as cars, clothes, or televisions with clay to observe their drying, cracking, and deterioration process. The piece Landscape. Clay Pulse presented at La Bisbal maintains the main lines of this organic aesthetic: installed in the Terracotta temporary exhibition hall, in an open space of fired tiles, it shows a ping-pong table covered in clay dust, with two balls of earth, a piece of geopolitical tile on a world that crumbles, breaks and gets dirty, but, at the same time, still retains hope that, like clay, with water and skill, the cracks can heal.

Beyond pure matter

"Matter is not just matter," the artist states, continuing: "Clay allows us to pay attention, to contemplate processes; it's a way of investigating what surrounds us. And now, unlike before, we know that the holes we make in the earth cannot be filled in any old way. Clay also speaks of limits, of fragility, of what we are, of what we are."

In Pere Noguera's pieces, matter is inseparable from form. It speaks, therefore, of roots and origins: both in the literal sense—because it is precisely in clay that the roots of trees grow—and in the symbolic sense, since the entire industrial and artisanal past of human evolution resonates in the manual work of clay. This is how Xavier Rocas, director of the museum and author of the exhibition texts, explains it: "Noguera's art is a response to the need to preserve our roots and constantly remember where we come from and who we are in order to maintain and strengthen our sense of belonging."

And Pere Noguera's sense of belonging to La Bisbal and the Terracotta Museum is quite natural, as he was director between 1996 and 2007, and many of his works are part of the collection. In fact, on the occasion of the exhibition, the museum has reissued the book La Bisbal Pottery. Clay as a material, the production process as a practice, a title originally published in 1978, born from Noguera's direct contact with workshops and workshops in the city, has been out of print for some time. The four institutions involved in the Pere Noguera Year are also preparing a joint book for next fall as a compendium of this commemorative year.