Xavier Toubes

The Spanish-born Xavier Toubes lived and worked here for two decades in the United States. Toubes work is based in ceramic sculpture. He works with a palette of strong primary and metallic colors, and a slurpy sense of formlessness. Despite his time in America he works with traditional European elegance so successfully realized in the eighteenth century. He makes his figures fugitive and ghost-like but doesn't abandon the human figure.

“For me to be an artist is a way to know how to be in the world. Although there is a purpose in the work, it is of the poetics and a matter of discovery and rediscovery as the work progresses. The surfaces, the skin, are more like a place, a surprise with no clues as to the beginning or the movement of the hand, making and moving in layers through form, color, light: present and pulsating. I work in series, often at the same time and in different studios and locations. Somewhat I hybridize all of these, juxtaposing, destroying, covering, erasing, in a movement that generates increasing demand to be in the studio. The work becomes a language that enriches, evolves, it transforms and gives hints to materialize the internal dialogue. The self-conscious attempt to name beauty is, for me, one of the clearest pursuits, in spite of placing the artist in a tentative, anxious, and vulnerable position. It is around here where I will locate the artifice, in the attempt to coordinate what I know and the not-yet-known, persevering for a result, that is not a conclusion, but an event that is visual and compelling occupying physical and mental space. Something that is not easily consumed, something big and universal, it touches on the real, is aware of the historical moment, but un-consumed by it.”