The roads of thirst
‘Echaurren reached Faenza in 1990 and began working, for the first time with majolica. For his artistic development, the old ceramic capital was a sort of “road to Damascus”. He began working with Davide Servadei, heir of the famous “Bottega Gatti”. As his model he took the “grotesque”, one of the main mannerist styles which lived its heyday in the early 16th century and is considered a “crisis style”. A clear revival in the homework of the current crisis, badly shielded by the supposition of a new world order, the tragicomic became one of Echaurren’s first ceramic stylistic codes. The Faenza experience represented a “level break” in his painting too. The artist rediscovered his origins – South America. the revenge of the blood, of his identity recovering the lesson of Joaquin Torres-Garda, Estuardo Maldonado and Aleiandro Puente. He delves deep into what he himself calls, “symbolic sickness”. The “cultural outskirts” of which Bonito Oliva speaks thus become all the places of the world not yet subjugated to the new global order of painting. Echaurren’s erudite manner is followed by a barbarous one. Per Giovanni Testori, Echaurren’s ceramics are «joyful and enjoyable». They are upheld and governed by “something belonging to the childhood of man”. In them reappears “that immense roar of daily living and religiousness, of dramatic for-ce and irony” of ancient pre Columbian art.’