Bordallo Pinheiro

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Wwb Quimera (Special Order)

Two great Portuguese artists – Alexandre Farto, also known as Vhils, and Raphael Bordallo Pinheiro – converge in Chimera, the third piece in the WWB – WorldWide Bordallianos collection, 135 years after the founding of the Bordallo Pinheiro Artistic Earthenware Factory.

In Chimera, Alexandre Farto shows the essence of Raphael Bordallo Pinheiro's brilliance – a ceramist, in his own factory, evoking all its workers – those of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Those who, daily, materialize and perpetuate the unique and revolutionary legacy that Bordallo Pinheiro has imprinted on the history of Portuguese ceramics and the world for 135 years.

Similarly to Raphael Bordallo Pinheiro, Alexandre Farto challenged all technical and artistic limits of ceramics in Chimera.

Chimera is a large wall decor plate with a diameter of 61 centimeters, which, as regards artistic painting, retrieves an age-old glaze overlapping technique that was applied to the first pieces produced by the Bordallo Pinheiro factory. Due to being hand-painted by Bordallo Pinheiro craftsmen, each of the 135 Chimera pieces are unique and unparalleled.

Alexandre Farto has developed an approach of proximity between his universe and that of Bordallo Pinheiro through experimental work and sharing of artistic knowledge with the factory, applying, in Chimera, a technique developed in his Scratching the Surface project, which consists of the sculpting of bas-relief surfaces by partially removing the surface layers to create compositions with volumetric contrast. In Chimera, this technique was applied by sandblasting, which thinned the upper layer of the artistic ceramic glaze into the shape of a face – the face of the anonymous heroes of the chimera of the Bordallo Pinheiro factory over the last 135 years

Portugal's most beloved cartoonist of the 19th century, Bordallo Pinheiro was famous for creating the character "Ze Povinho," a rustic laborer who was kind to his friends and contemptuous of those with money and power. His artistic style blends the honesty realism of late 19th-century Arts and Crafts movement with the dramatic, even grotesque, features of Goya's earlier paintings.

In 1884, he and his son founded an eponymous factory in Caldas da Rainha along the Portuguese coast to create whimsical and naturalistic faience pieces based on his art. Because of the special minerals in the local soil and the skills of the craftsmen in the area, Caldas da Rainha is well-known as the capital of Portuguese pottery. Today the factory takes Pinheiro's original style into the 21st century with satirical portraits of modern day celebrities, while continuing its old fashioned, made by hand tradition of Portuguese pottery making.