“Manyfold series” 2004

Technique: Blown and hand sculpted Recycled & colored glass.

Photo Credits: Bob Schalkwijk

This series explores the traces of glass by creating folds of gathers. I was interested in this particular moment of the recollection of glass, emulating the growth of the piece in the same way an organism grows. Also, during the manufacturing of the series many peculiarities (cavities, folds, air traps, ripples, bents) happen, and the sum of them results in the piece.  I like to leave them, and even enhance them, to show the action of time and chance in a piece. Finally, the dislocation on the visual vertical axis is also intended and guided, and it plays a reference to the organic synthesis of glass.

 

Valerian Glass, 2004.

Hugo Hiriart

 

Valeria Florescano knows the pleasure of molding that kind of light that, submited to the heat, earns materiality and appears like a drop of rarefied redish air, ambiguously soft and unsteady mass that the human breath by that sort of silent trumpet swells into a certain molded substance or definite balloon.

 Because, much better seen, glass, the luminous glass, is withheld water in space.

And if, the knowledgeable of natural history say that glass is not a real solid, but a liquid, a liquid spilling with extraordinary slowness. Flat glass is transparent water straightened and quite arrogant, neurotic, and delicate to extreme, in its touchy fragility.

But Valeria’s,  is soft glass, molded, colorful, with that nervous vitality that color only collects in the feathers of the bird or in the depth of blown glass. There the color is more than ever, that is the idea.

You cannot only look at Valeria’s pieces, the hand, moves across the texture and touches them, Can there be something as smooth as glass? Smooth, yes, and unexpectedly heavy, manyfolds of glass, densely accumulated.

On the table top, seen from afar, a piece of Valeria, appears quitely  like a minimum ziggurat sitting  upright on the table; and that other seems like a pond of quiet water; and that other is a volcano on eruption, spilling lava.

But to look closely they are no tower, nor pond, nor volcano, but masterly archieved glass pieces, because the paradox of the art of hand blown glass is that glass should  look like glass, and nothing else.

Therefore, Valeria Florescano, we wish you fortune and inventiveness in the warm universe of blown glass.