Ramon Puig
Cuyàs.
The activity of creating is an adventure for
me, which takes me away from the everyday, casting me beyond horizons of known
and assured things. It doesn’t matter what medium we employ, whether it be
jewellery or painting, music or writing, to create is to invent oneself, to
create oneself.
Creating is my way of satisfying an
indefinable need to transform, construct, illuminate, to turn the invisible
into the visible and to be able to do so with my own hands. The act of creation
is as though a journey to conquer an innermost sense of freedom, and to satisfy
a deep desire to feel myself alive. I am impelled to commence each new work by
the need to respond to a challenge, that of turning a pre-feeling into a real feeling. Planning and constructing is to
live the experience of some moments of fullness and emotion.
Each piece of jewellery emerges after a long
process wrought from repetition, rehearsal, elimination, selection and decision,
as well as an evolution of feelings, emotions, certainties and doubts. A
process which is an attempt to reveal, materialise something indefinable, as though
an internal design, born of intuition, in order to turn it into an expression
of consciousness.
Although I start each new work without any
plan or prior schema, my most recent finished piece often stands as a model for
me to use and so realise what I must look for next. Whilst drawing and making
exploratory sketches, I attempt to go into a state of concentration, of active
attention, in order to listen, feel or provoke an internal pre-vision. I search for a mental image which serves as a guide,
though nothing is defined or specific. The drawings frequently serve to explore
new paths and variations in composition, although it is when working directly
with the materials that the dialogue becomes more intense.
Both experience and technical mastery
facilitate a handling of materials, tools and hands with apparent ease,
enabling their expression. I endeavour deliberately to leave in those traces
and marks made through the working process, as they are the records of this
dialogue. Working with my hands awakens in me a sense of humanity, it makes me
more perceptive and sharpens the senses. Thought and clarity are almost always
arrived at through action, they come with that dialogue between materials and
shapes. Making is for me a way of thinking and I try to ensure that the result
of this making be a testament, materialised through a piece of jewellery
charged with the will to express.
I like to improvise when in contact with the
materials, exploring their possibilities and stretching their limits. Working
with a material allows me to assess results immediately and in a direct way. I
attempt to make the process of creation one of flow rather than fight, such
that solutions appear naturally, as though inevitable. However, at times the
best results appear only after hard and persistent effort.
Formally, I need to structure my pieces on
the basis of a strict compositional syntax which either comes close to, or
gives the impression of polyphony. I seek a sound, or harmonies amongst the
straight and curved lines, in the variations of planes and in the contrasts
amid colours and materials. I try to create an order whereby the chaos of ideas
and feelings reign.
It is possibly for this reason that most of
my works are structured compositionally as separate elements, as assemblies,
thereby creating virtual spaces rather than filled volume. I ensure that the object
as a whole isn’t seen, not completely perceived at first sight, instead, the
gaze wanders and runs around a subtle network of visual itineraries, exploring
and discovering harmonious and contrasting relationships amongst the various
parts of the object, making a necessary tempo
for the gaze to linger on, staying in every corner of the overall composition.
In this way the viewers gaze isn’t passive, rather it is participative.
For me, this sought compositional harmony is
like a metaphor for the desire, the need, to reconstruct the harmony and
equilibrium between man and nature. Making a piece of jewellery is to
illuminate a microcosm that must take part in the balance and harmony of the
macrocosm.
Colour has been a fundamental element in my
work for many years, both part of my nature and my cultural and everyday
surroundings. Colour gives me the opportunity to accentuate the expressive
qualities of the composition.
Yet not all is harmony and balance, as
tension and conflict are fundamental too for the act of creation to be fertile.
Tensions and a conflict of feelings were the framework around which I worked to
make the series Imago mundi and Utopos, between 2007 and 2010.
Something that was there already suddenly emerged unexpectedly, giving a fresh
thrust to creative strengths. Colour disappeared, black and white, with some
grey tinges were then sufficient to stir up a much denser atmosphere in
comparison with previous works. Black and white, shapes and materials,
microcosms and macrocosms, all these established a suggestive dialectic, laden
with meaning.
Everything, whether lines, planes, volume,
textures, materials, colours, the technique employed, the very composition, all
these elements become metaphor. Nothing should be gratuitous, everything has to
be filled with meaning and the best method I know of to achieve this is through
visual metaphor. The metaphor is a carrier for ideas, while I also like it
because it does so in an ambiguous and imprecise way. It suggests symmetries
and contrasts, it sets up subtle analogies, it contains implicit potential. The
metaphor charges the piece of jewellery with various meanings, although it
cannot, nor would want to, explain these meanings conceptually. It is precisely
because of this lack of definition that the metaphor helps me to materialise in
images all that pertains to the world of the non-definable, which tends to be
much more interesting than the rational and definable world.
Finally then, my work’s central aim is for
the object produced by my hands to be more than just a form of expression,
rather that it be a way of sharing with others the experience lived through my
working process, of all that I’ve found, discovered and made visible. And also
to suggest to the wearer that the simple gesture of putting on a piece of
jewellery can in itself also become a metaphor.
Ramon Puig
Cuyàs.
Translation:
Anne Michie