Arcadio Blasco

ARCADIO BLASCO (Mutxamel, Alicante, 1928-2013).
Untitled.
Ceramic, terracotta and wood.
Signed and dated.
Measurements: 38 x 37 cm; 42 x 42 cm (frame).
The work of Arcadio Blasco is part of one of the most significant processes of renewal of Spanish art in the second half of the twentieth century, in which the craft tradition is reconfigured from the languages of modernity. Trained at the Schools of Fine Arts in Madrid and Valencia, and later at the Spanish Academy in Rome, Blasco developed a practice that overflowed the conventional categories between painting and ceramics, placing the latter in a fully contemporary territory. From the formal point of view, Blasco's work is characterized by a progressive materialization of pictorial language. His ceramic pieces, far from the traditional decorative function, acquire a sculptural and architectural dimension, where texture, roughness and the trace of the process take center stage.
Painter and ceramist, Arcadio Blasco was trained at the Fine Arts Schools of Madrid and Valencia, and completed his studies at the Spanish Academy in Rome. In 1955 he set up his first workshop in the University City of Madrid, where he carried out important projects and collaborated with artists such as José Vento, Hernández Mompó, Rafael Canogar, Antonio Saura, etc. This provisional workshop became a meeting place for artists of the young Madrid avant-garde. Arcadio Blasco showed his work both in Spain and abroad, in cities such as Amsterdam, New York and Milan.