Exhibitions
Two ways to listen to the subject
Madola and Victòria Rabal share at the Catalonia Crafts Centre two trajectories built from ceramics and paper, between memory, time and creative freedom.
Ceramics and paper are, for Madola and Victòria Rabal, much more than two techniques or two supports: they are territories of research, spaces where the experience accumulated over the years meets intuition and the ability to let each work follow its own path.
This is the starting point of When the material already knows the way , the exhibition that the Centre d'Artesania Catalunya dedicates to two exceptional trajectories of craftsmanship, both recognized with the National Craft Award. The exhibition establishes a dialogue between two very personal universes that, despite starting from different materials and languages, share the same way of understanding creation.
In Madola's work, ceramics are charged with memory. Their volumes, with essential and often silent forms, evoke walls, doors, landscapes, horizons and vestiges of ancient cultures. They are pieces that seem to contain the trace of what is no longer there and that situate time as an inseparable dimension of matter. Emptiness, absence and permanence thus become elements as important as the volume that delimits them.
Victòria Rabal starts from paper to build a universe of a very different nature. Through repetition, construction and meticulous work, she explores the possibilities of a material usually associated with fragility and transforms it into structures with a strong sculptural presence. Light and shadow, rhythm and transparency establish a changing relationship between the work and the space that surrounds it. Here too, the void ceases to be simply what is missing to acquire a presence of its own.
Between both artists there is not so much a desire to confront languages as to highlight what unites them. Madola and Rabal have developed two ways of working deeply rooted in experience, but without ever giving up on surprise. Their relationship with materials does not start from a preconceived idea that must then be executed, but from a process in which thinking and doing advance simultaneously.
This is precisely one of the questions that the exhibition articulates: the craft understood not only as the mastery of a technique, but as a form of knowledge. Over the years, the material ceases to be an unknown territory, but this does not mean that it ceases to raise questions. On the contrary, a deep knowledge of a material allows us to discover new possibilities and keep open the capacity to experiment.
When the matter already knows the way brings together two artists who have made fidelity to their own voice a way of understanding creation. Ceramics and paper become two ways of approaching time, memory and space, but also a claim for an artisanal practice in which the hand, the gaze and thought are part of the same process.
The exhibition can be visited at the Centre d'Artesania Catalunya until November 8, 2026, and proposes an encounter between two works that, from different paths, share the same certainty: matter is never just the place where an idea is deposited, but also what helps to think about it.
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