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Shapes and portrayals

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This intense search is still ongoing, and is filled with dreams and intuitions. Pablo says that he sleeps and wakes in the world of pottery, and that dreams have given him a path to follow in his work. These are nighttime dreams, of people who come and take him to caves or ancient cemeteries and teach him to make ceramic pieces.
"I have made pieces of pottery that I have seen in my dreams, I have entered rooms and seen pieces and them reproduced them,"
The Seminarios are firm believers in their own intuition, an intuition that brought them to the valley, an intuition that spurs them to research and recreate a language that has yet to be deciphered.
"There are designs that we've made for years and don't know why we make them. And them suddenly one day we're walking somewhere in Peru and come across it. You start to recognize shapes, objects and animals that identify your country, your culture".

The ceramic portrayals made by the Seminarios teem with magical elements and games, characters in simple shapes, in the Vicús style, seafish, stars in striking colors and geometrically-shaped ancient temples.
Here we find extraordinary characters, flying figures which are very common in Nazca and Paracas iconography which come to the coastal desert to glide over colorful Andean landscapes, studded with fields of corn and soaring mountains. The Seminarios describe them as "the idea of guardians, spirits, angels or whatever you like to call them. But they are always beings, linked spirits, which connect us to the world above, the religious, magical world. We also admire beings with a complex inner world, birds whose bodies show the landscapes they have flown over, and the beings wrapped up in their thoughts".

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Pablo believes each living being has an inner world, filled with dreams and memories, which he translates into images on clay. "The bird also has its own world, so it is a world within a world within a world. We also have another world within our world. It is a way of portraying the different visions of the world in various ways. It's one thing for me to draw a landscape within a human figure, and quite another to draw that same landscape within a bird figure - they'll give you different sensations. The figure of a man standing they're with a landscape inside will give you an idea of a static landscape seen by someone standing on the ground. But if you put the landscape inside a bird, it can make you feel as if you were flying and gazing down at the landscape from above".

In addition to being a proposal to revive tradition and Peru's culture, the Seminarios' work is an art that wishes to bring magic and the world of dreams back to people's lives. For many, the motifs and colors of the potters' designs can strike them as childish, and they are. As Marilú says, their work involves creating "an object that makes us happy, which makes us feel good, and which simply is to be looked at, which creates an ambiance, which makes you dream. We grab the part that gives one a sensation of a childish, almost naif world".
"The idea is that it nourishes what we call the spirit, and help you to live." Pablo adds. Part of his interest in crafting utilitarian objects stems from bring these designs to people's everyday lives, nourishing people in their capacity to watch and dream on a daily basis: "Our function is also found in a cup. Not just the cup itself, but the decoration of that cup".

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Today, one comes across the Seminarios' pottery in countless locales and homes in Cuzco. However some 90% of the work that Pablo Seminario produces at his workshop is exported, and the Seminarios' pieces are now found all over the world. Researchers at the San Francisco Modern Art Museum have visited Urubamba to study their work, and the Seminarios' pieces constantly appear in magazines on decoration and art in several countries. However, the Seminarios do not lose sight of their own style and are not distracted from their goal: "I can't consider it a challenge to be stuck in museums, art galleries, exhibitions, to be a great ´artist'.
My goal is here, in this search, this cultural recreation, this idea of providing continuity to art, in something that is so highly personal.
What's more, I don't have the time, I have enough work to do with what I'm doing now. I never seen to have enough time, there's so much more to get out and see and investigate."

Text of Rumbos Magazin

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