MEIR LOBATON CORONA

Peltre Pools

in collaboration with: Natalia Porter Bolland

type: artwork // location: Eyelevel BQE Gallery, Brooklyn NY // metal + blue stardust enamel // dimension:

description: Vitreous glass fired to metal is the oldest painting medium, reaching back to prehistory; but it is demanding work, requiring great patience and a knowledge of its technology in addition to artistry. As a result, few artists pursue it today, but its history is long and distinguished, from the Celts to the Etruscans to Byzantium to Limoges to China to Japan. Enamel ranges from exquisite cloisonné jewelry like Lalique’s, Charlemagne’s crown, and altarpieces like the Pala D’Oro in Venice at San Marcos [now in the apse of the church], to the Renaissance Limoges grisailles in most museum collections, to architectural murals.

Due to its physical characteristics -its resistance to both water and high temperature- and its relatively inexpensive price when compared to that of other materials with similar qualities like inoxidable steel or aluminum, the enamel has been widely used as a coating for everyday use utensils such as cookware, dinnerware, etc.

In Mexico, the peltre [blue stardust enamel] artifacts constitute an unequivocal icon of our popular culture and local identity, by metaphorically melting the pots we aim to un-program the peltre cookware in order to understand the essence the material and rethink its functional and aesthetical potentials, in other words, to disassociate it from its utilitarian value and open it for new possible uses, meanings and interpretations.

This process is similar that of the decontextualization and redefinition of functions undergone by crafts in different social spaces and classes: Indian households, peasant markets and fairs, shops, boutiques, galleries, museums and urban households. Where sometimes the spontaneous creation of the people and their collective memory is transformed into a commodity and the unequal appropriation and distribution of cultural capital is thus revealed.

This project is the first iteration of an ongoing research focused on the use of locally charged materials and traditional modes of production as a vehicle to restate the understanding of popular cultures not merely as a process of creating, marketing, and consuming a final product, but as an expression of the artist's surroundings and an attempt to alter them.