The uncompromising ceramics of Antoni Cumella

BarcelonaThe ceramist Antoni Cumella (1913-1985) is remembered as "energetic, impulsive, and enterprising." He knew he wanted to be an artist from a young age. He was also known for his loyalty. The critic Alexandre Cirici Pellicer described him as a man "of the kind Caesar wanted around him to avoid the presence of traitors," "lucid, constant, obstinate, faithful." And the critic André Barey asserted that it was necessary to visit him in his studio to witness how he sought "a painful balance between the outside world and his own." "What is important for Cumella is confronting the essential, rejecting conformity and frivolity, never changing the form without having deeply considered the content," Barey said.

All of this is abundantly clear in the exhibition that the Artur Ramon Art gallery is dedicating to Cumella until March 13. The exhibition features around fifty works dating from the 1950s to the 1980s, including decorative pieces, plaques, and sculptures. Antoni Cumella's legacy remains somewhat unjustly neglected, and this exhibition offers a welcome opportunity to give it the recognition it deserves. The last exhibition of his work in Barcelona was at the Dau al Set gallery in 1974. More recently, the Museo del Cántaro in Argentona dedicated an exhibition to him in 2015. And it is planned that he will be represented in the MNAC's expansion.

The ceramics in the gallery window are striking: they are the last pieces he made before his sudden death from a stroke. Some are unfinished, displayed on a shelf he designed himself, and there's a photograph of one taken by his son Toni in the workshop while he was in a coma during an exceptional frost. "I simply fired the unfinished ones at a low temperature to maintain their shape," says Toni Cumella, considered a leading figure in ceramics applied to architecture.

The pieces on display, all of them different shapes and colors, are arranged on boards in groups, as Cumella, a self-taught artist, liked to show them. "He was influenced by the ceramics of the Chinese Song and Ming dynasties, which were devoid of ornamentation. He had encountered them through books in the Granollers library, and he maintained that essence of form and glaze until the end," says Toni Cumella. At the time of his death, Cumella was a renowned artist both locally and internationally, and a year later the Museum of Contemporary Spanish Art dedicated an exhibition to him in his honor. "My father didn't ask for an exhibition; he assumed that if they didn't ask, it meant they weren't interested. This caused him a lot of inner turmoil. And we've done the same," says Cumella's son.

Antoni Cumella defined ceramics as "a sculpture of revolution." He is remembered for being very demanding, and he would destroy any pieces that didn't satisfy him. Regarding glazes, one of the milestones is the red known as "oxblood," that is, a copper glaze fired with reduced oxygen. This causes it to turn red instead of green. It is a typical oriental glaze. "My father had a very clear vision of the final result; chance made him nervous," says Cumella's son.

Regarding the plaques, it's striking that some are informalist paintings while others recall the organic forms of Gaudí and Jujol, who were his teachers. There are also other works that result from deforming a brick and elevating it to an artistic dimension. "There's a transition from flat relief pieces to three-dimensional ones, but I didn't differentiate between them; it's all the result of a particular way of thinking about ceramics," he explains.

The challenge of saving the murals of the Sandoz building

Antoni Cumella is also one of the great artists in the integration of art into contemporary architecture between the 1950s and 1970s, as can be seen in one of the works on display: a model of the ceramic mural he created for the former Sandoz headquarters. This is one of his most outstanding works in this field. Now the mural has returned to the spotlight due to the debate surrounding its fragmentation and relocation during the building's renovation. And the curtains that have been hung in front of it are jarring. Neither the building, designed by Xavier Busquets, nor the mural were listed as historical artifacts, so the new owners were able to destroy them without any administrative issues. The mural is a continuous relief that spells out the letters of the word Sandoz with a mosaic of different types of glazed stoneware tiles. The most striking are the plaques whose organic volumes recall Gaudí's architecture, like some of those that can be seen in the exhibition at Artur Ramon Art.

The building has become the headquarters of a single company in a rented office building called Monumento. The mural was on the main façade, but the new owners, FREO and BC Partners, wanted to open it up to provide light for the canteen, cafeteria, and new offices where the maintenance department had previously been located. The architect of the renovation, Fermín Vázquez (b720 studio), convinced them to preserve the mural, and the owners agreed to cover the cost of its preservation. Less than 10% of the artwork was lost in the process, but all the three-dimensional panels were repositioned. Now the mural is displayed in two sections: one at the back of the room and the other along one side. "The building wasn't listed as a protected building, and it would have been desirable for it to be. A case like this is complicated because not enough time has passed for the architecture and craftsmanship of that era to be socially recognized, and they are still often seen as outdated, and people don't always have the sensitivity to maintain them," says the b720 architect. In that case, the main challenge was "the financial one," says Garrido, because it was an expensive operation. "Technically, what was done was to cut the mural into different parts, reinforce them with a structure, and move them. The treatment of the joints makes the cut barely visible," he explains.