Biography

1956

Claudi Casanovas y Sarsanedas (Barcelona, 1956) is the third of four children born to Marçal Casanovas and Maria Rosa Sarsanedas. He is the grandson of the Noucentista sculptor Enric Casanovas and the lacquerer and introducer of the urushi technique in Catalonia in the early 20th century, Ramón Sarsanedas. In 1959, his family moved to Olot. He currently lives in Riudaura.

1971

Casanovas discovered his attraction to ceramics at the age of 15, when he first saw Xavier Codina throwing pots in the workshop of Father Marià Oliveras, at the Capuchin church in Olot. Enthused by this discovery, he decided to accompany his friend Xavier to the classes given by the friar.

His first works were ashtrays and small jars made from clay from La Bisbal, fired at low temperature in a small electric kiln, using industrial glazes in very bright red and orange tones.

1972

At the age of 16, he enrolled at the Municipal School of Fine Arts in Olot, directed by Joan Vilà Moncau. Together with Quim Domene, he began engraving at a time when Joan Ponç's etchings were all the rage. However, he was deeply disappointed by the ceramics course taught by Montserrat Mas. What he did benefit from were the drawing classes taught by Professor Juli Batallé, a diligent and methodical man who knew his craft well.

1973

Casanovas began firing wood-fired kilns in the small Artigas muffle kiln that Xavier Codina had built in the workshop he had just set up in Mas La Triola, in the heart of La Fageda d'en Jordà. Using a foot-powered wheel, he turned tall tubes of low-temperature red clay. Through Codina, he met Joan Carrillo, a former disciple of Father Marià, like them, who was also building his own wood-fired kiln (larger than Codina's as it had two fires) at Mas El Roble, near Riudaura.

The use of all kinds of waste materials to make tools was common among potters in the Casanovas area: the ribs of an umbrella could be used to make punches, the machinery of a disused alarm clock was transformed into scales for weighing oxides and dyes...

It was during this year that Carrillo accepted his young friend Casanovas as an apprentice.

That year, architect Xavier Bolòs commissioned Casanovas to create a ceramic mural for the entrance of the new Frederic Mistral school in Barcelona. To create it, Casanovas used an old kneading machine belonging to his father Marià and fired the pieces in Carrillo's kiln. He worked in secret and with anxiety, fearing that at any moment he could be arrested by the Civil Guard for being a fugitive from military service.

The final firing of the mural served to inaugurate, unfortunately, the new large gas kiln belonging to Cerdanyola's friends, Jaume Toldrà and Kim Montsalvatge, who had just settled in Can Bertranet in Vall de Bianya. The fact was that some pieces that were too exposed to the direct flame melted and solidified into extremely hard, vitrified lava inside one of the fire entrances. Casanovas found no other solution than to use a small radial grinder to repair the damage. It was in this accidental way that Casanovas discovered the possibilities offered by this polishing tool for cold finishing ceramics.

The frieze, which alternated between trencadís and black ceramics, was structured in two symbolic lines: reason and vital instinct, culminating at the door in the synthesis represented by the school itself.

Frederic Mistral's mural was destroyed thirty years later as a result of renovations at the school.

Meanwhile, in Carrillo's workshop, Casanovas experimented with raku, the first margin kilns, carbonisation, over-temperatures, stoneware, boiling, softening and deformation inside the kiln. Meanwhile, in Codina's workshop, he fired the piece Terres enllà, which combined high- and low-temperature clays arranged in stripes and won an award at the IV International Ceramics Biennial in Manises.

The firing of Terres enllà marked a turning point in Casanovas' work because it was the first time he had brought the clay to the point of boiling in a controlled manner, causing partial deformation of the original piece. In this way, Casanovas proved that it was possible to control how fire affects and transforms clay inside the kiln at will. A whole new world of possibilities suddenly opened up.

That same year, the Cocer cooperative was formed by local ceramists Joan Carrillo, Xavier Codina, Xavier Bulbena, Xavier Ruscalleda, Isabel Torquemada, Jaume Toldrà, Kim Montsalvatge, Àlex Terma and Claudi Casanovas. Their aim was to create a commercial union to jointly sell the pieces produced individually by each artist, as well as to organise collective exhibitions and promote activities to raise awareness of ceramics.

During its ten years of activity, the cooperative promoted collective exhibitions in specialist ceramics shops, galleries and public venues; two professional meetings on raku, one national and the other international, with a closing exhibition at the Barcelona Ceramics Museum; the Estiu Japó meeting, attended by seven invited Japanese ceramists and more than two hundred participants; and micro-exhibitions by invited ceramists: Michel Moglia, Maria Bofill, Pep Madrenes, Neus Coll, Dolors Bosch and Joan Cots.

The Coure experience allowed Casanovas to exhibit and share experiences, compare other ways of understanding ceramic practice and, with the strength of the group, undertake projects that he would never have been able to tackle alone. If the Cerdanyola workshop was his school, the Coure cooperative was his university.

Casanovas left the cooperative in 1987.

At the age of 21 and with little work of his own to his name, Casanovas set up his first workshop on the ground floor of Mas la Nogareda, provided by Xavier Gassiot and very close to Joan Carrillo's workshop.

He built a three-cubic-metre diesel-fired catenary kiln, specially designed for stoneware, following the instructions in Daniel Rhodes' books, Les Fours and Tierras te glaçures.

He carried out hundreds of tests on high-temperature glazes, more or less in the oriental style. This step marked a decisive change of direction in Casanovas's subsequent work: at high temperatures, rocks, metals and ashes melt; clays vitrify on the inside, and there is no boundary between the clay and the glazes applied to the surface. The hardness of fired stoneware is very close to that of granite or basalt. But there are also drawbacks: the materials and burners are much more sophisticated and expensive, and natural stoneware clays are practically non-existent in Catalonia.

With the tests in the new workshop, the horizons continue to expand. He feels strongly influenced by the archaic Japanese ceramics of Binzen: fusible ashes, earths marked by fire, mineral earths, strong earths, deformed earths...

That January, Casanovas and Maite Gelis embarked on a trip through France, during which they visited numerous ceramics studios.

Casanovas increasingly uses a radial sander for cold surface abrasion once the piece has been fired. He is very interested in stoneware, deformations and the boiling of the paste. Even so, he sticks to the most basic repertoire of the potter: plates, bowls and jugs. He moves from the completely open plane of plates to the folded shape of bowls and, ultimately, to the completely closed shape of jugs and pitchers. Utility objects (tea sets, sugar bowls, oil cruets, plates, bowls, glasses, jugs, umbrella stands and flower pots) alternate with unique pieces, signature pieces for exhibitions.

That was the year Xevi Codina gave up pottery and left the Coure group. He was replaced by Àlex Terma, with whom Casanovas shared six years of work at the Nogareda workshop.

Carrillo and Casanovas participated in several exhibitions, two of which were in Germany and in which Xavier Bulbena also participated. Casanovas presented some stoneware pieces with a minimal presence of glaze.

At the age of twenty-four, he was awarded the City of Olot Fine Arts Scholarship for a collection of pieces made using over-tempering, boiling and cold abrasion techniques.

This experience gave rise to a whole series of small double-walled pieces that resembled solid volcanic bodies and oval and circular minerals, all based on the turn and its geometries. The sphere, the egg, the seed or the fruit, with their clean, taut surfaces, were the central motif.

Three pieces, carefully enamelled and presented only with a gravel base, openly explored the concept of “la pienezza della forma”.

Casanovas held his first solo exhibition, Cortezas de Tierra (Earth Bark), at the Olot Museum.

His friend Vicens Gibert encouraged him to present his work to the director of the Barcelona Ceramics Museum, Trinidad Sánchez Pacheco, who received it with great interest and invited him to exhibit at the centre in 1983.

To produce these pieces, Casanovas incorporated several technical innovations. First, to abrade the innermost areas of the pieces, which were inaccessible with the radial grinder, he began to use pressurised sandblasting. Then, he began to work with plaster moulds that allowed him to obtain one or more pieces. Finally, the production of the moulds consisted of cutting two plastic sheets with the profile of the desired piece, welding them together and blowing pressurised air into them until the surfaces became taut, as happens with fairground balloons.

All this allowed him to appreciate a whole new repertoire of silhouettes inspired by archaic Mediterranean amphorae.

Bizen ceramics, which had given him so much energy, lost prominence to the austere forms, inspired by archaic Mediterranean art, of the Englishman Hans Coper. His admiration for Mediterranean archaism also came from the work of his paternal grandfather, Enric Casanovas, the Noucentista sculptor par excellence.

At the age of twenty-nine, Casanovas moved his business to the newly built workshop (made possible thanks to the help of Pere Gelis, Maite Gelis's father) in the neighbourhood of La Costa de Riudaura, just below Carrillo's.

Casanovas built himself a new diesel kiln, like the previous one, but with a catenary return. He also acquired a sandblaster, which was built for him at little cost by his friend and mechanic Xicu Galobardes.

Together with the Coure cooperative, he organised the Estiu Japó-86 event. It was a resounding success that marked a turning point in the world of artisan ceramics, both in Catalonia and Spain. As a result of the event, the Catalan Association of Ceramists was created, as well as new groups of ceramists throughout the country. In addition, the live demonstrations by the Japanese masters had a clear influence on Catalan, Spanish and French ceramists.

Three masters from Kyoto participated: Hiroaki Taimei Morino, Miyanaga Rikichi and Mutsuo Yanagihara, along with a group of younger, more alternative ceramists: Satoru Hoshino, Ryoji Koie, Kimiyo Mishima and Araki Takako.

Of the seven guests, Koie was considered an outsider in the hierarchical world of Kyoto masters. Even so, this experience gave him enormous self-confidence. The cathartic climax came at the end of the screening of a film about Koie, fire and ceramics, when a large group of spectators rushed to embrace him with tears of emotion. Four years later, Koie would be a celebrity recognised throughout Japan.

In 1990, as a token of gratitude for what Estiu Japó-86 had brought him, Koie invited the artists of the Coure cooperative on a trip to central Japan. That was Casanovas' first trip to Japan.

All these encounters gave rise to a close friendship between Koie and Casanovas that lasted for years.

Casanovas builds a new kiln, but this one is flat, square, with fireproof fiber walls, a metal structure, and one main gas burner and two smaller heating burners. For a short period, this new kiln will coexist with the catenary kiln.

In addition to the kiln and sandblaster, Casanovas acquires a paste maker to make his own pastes from the French clay he begins to work with, thus ending his dependence on commercial suppliers. Finally, he incorporates a hydraulic stacker, which allows him to move on to large-format pieces.

All this opened the door to a totally new way of working, full of possibilities: jugs and wall plates increase in size, but continue to be made from a single piece (Casanovas rejects the classic technique of composing several elements); horizontal firing, made possible by the new kiln, allowed oxidation and carbonization to leave an imprint never seen before, achieving finishes that were impossible to achieve with the old procedures.

On one of the plates, Casanovas melted more than 30 kilos of feldspar on its surface, something unthinkable on a vertical wall. In another, he fired the earthenware plate on its wooden support (as in the origin of Tatin cakes) and obtained spots of carbonization, oxidation, reduction, and cracks that would have been impossible to achieve vertically.

The resulting series of wall plates was exhibited at the Hetjens Museum in Düsseldorf, thanks to ceramic restorer Brigitte Wagner, a collaborator with the Barcelona Ceramics Museum.

That same year, London gallery owner and collector Anita Besson proposed an exhibition to Casanovas at her newly opened gallery in the heart of the City. The opening was attended by ceramist Lucie Rie, a personal friend of Besson's, who invited Casanovas to tea at her home-studio.

This first exhibition in London marked the beginning of a professional relationship and friendship between the ceramist and the gallery owner that lasted until Besson's death in November 2015.

At the end of the same year, Casanovas also exhibited for the first time at the Palau de Caramany gallery in Girona, directed by Rosa Pous. The pieces presented were a set of wall plaques.

At the end of that year, Anita Besson offered him a second exhibition. Casanovas brought larger wall plates with more elaborate compositions than those presented in the first exhibition.

The gallery, with a large skylight in the ceiling, received filtered natural light, which was excellent for ceramics. The gallery's location was privileged and unbeatable, as it was in the middle of the City of London. However, there was the drawback that it was not at street level but on the first floor, which meant that the pieces had to be carried up a narrow spiral staircase. Despite the difficulty, two men with great strength and skill managed to get Casanovas' pieces up the stairs.

At the age of thirty-three, Casanovas received a grant from the Generalitat of Catalonia that allowed him to spend time working in Japan. Ryoji Koie welcomed him into his workshop, which had belonged to the ceramist Jun Kaneko and was surrounded by fir forests and rice fields.

Koie provided Casanovas with everything he might need during his stay and even organized an exhibition for him at the Koyanagi Gallery in Tokyo. Meanwhile, Koie went to Olot to the studio of Joan Carrillo and Isabel Torquemada, also for a working stay. They only coincided for four or five days at the end of Casanovas' stay.

The pieces resulting from Casanovas' stay were exhibited first in Tokyo and then in London in 1991.

In December 1990, Casanovas presented the first two large wall plates to the Caramany Gallery in Girona. The exhibition was completed by a group of eight large jugs, which represented the vertical version of the plate work.

Casanovas has always shied away from following any master. He believes that his resources, more or less limited, more or less ingenious, personalize his work. He is also afraid of being overly influenced by the work of others. Unintentionally, however, it can be said that Koie has been his closest master.