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GOBLETS


In the hands of Maria Bofill ceramics dematerialize. To go further reducing the material seems impossible. Support to shape and colour only. Almost a drawing: drafts, thinly surfaces, pure sensitiveness in a difficult equilibrium as per the complicity of our gaze. Porcelain offers possibilities that have to be corresponded. More than formal exhibitions or textures it seems to demand us daintyness flexibility, an act that is both external and internal.

The material contemplates itself. One has to be very attentive in order to percept the airy vibration a sort of a very subtile palpitation which is difficult to know neither how real it is nor the inner spaces of our essence that are implicated in it.

J. Corredor Mateos
 excerpt from the catalogue of the exhibition at Museu de Ceràmica, Barcelona.
December 1985 – January 1986

 

LABYRINTH 

From her first goblets or perhaps capitals,made in the 1980s, where, as it to her to minaret like towers, or her currents labyrints, evidence of her profund mediterranean spirit, overlain with a strongly oriental atmosphere, porcelain has provided Maria Bofill with a wide range of qualities which stoneware could not.

Pilar Vélez
excerpt from the catalogue of the exhibition at Museu Nacional do Azulejo, Lisboa. 
January – April 1998

 

ARCHITECTURE OF LANDSCAPE


Maria Bofill has been a headlight in contemporary ceramic sculpture since she started working with this technique. If one had to define plainly the sculpture of Maria Bofill the more adequate terms would be that of monumental and extremely delicate. I those last years she has preferred porcelain to stoneware for the possibility it offers to transmit opposed caracteristics: hardness-fragility, ornamentality-rigour (strictness) mediterraneanity-universality, classicism-modernithy, etc. The rich expressiveness of her column-cups, boastful of imagination, sensitiveness, proportion and to-day’s mediterranean reconstruction are presented as a transition from usefulness to vigorous aestheticism. Dainty and evoking labyrinths that gradually grasp and shade the light. Series that refer to minimalism altering themselves by the difference between its elements and their own individual character.

The hardness of the porcelain becomes vulnerable due to the delicate “craquelé” of her architectures. Summary peristyle, arches and framed structures make light and air inseperable part of peremptory and monumental volumes. Snowy constructions with iridescent lapislazuli that include the tread of a sculptress who evokes other traces of a mediterranean past that had configured our culture.

Antonio Garrido Moreno
 excerpt from the catalogue of the exhibition Escultura Cerámica Ibérica Contemporánea.
Pazo de Cultura de Pontevedra, April 2007