For his ceramic practice, Mauro often draws from the distinctive memory of picking seashells as a child. Growing up in Madrid, but spending his summers on the Spanish coast, the shells and objects that the waves would wash ashore were charged with meanings that escaped him. Not only did they arrive from a realm inaccessible to him, they often came with crusted structures, seaweed attached, amalgamated, battered by time and tides. The natural world, in its broadness, is still an inspiration, but Mauro stays away from the literal. It serves as a point of departure to search for that particular feeling of awe associated with childhood, when the world seemed larger, full of mystery and uncertainty. Confabulation III (Amphora) is an artwork that, though it begins as an amphora, moves away from that description. The initial recognizable shape is overtaken by an element foreign to it. The human-made lines disappear beneath an organic cloud that envelops the vessel, like a school of fish turning synchronously. Some familiar profiles remain, but the overall feeling is dislocated. What results is a hybrid, a kind of chimera, an object of double origin caught between two directions.

 

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Mauro Fariñas, Confabulation III (Amphora), 2025, stoneware, glaze, ashes, 53 x 31 x 23 cm.