Chus Burés, the Catalan jewelry master, tells us that if you went to visit Carmen Herrera at noon, she would greet you with champagne. If it was in the afternoon, she would take out the bottle of whiskey.
He once asked him: “Is this the secret to your longevity?”
Herrera, a Cuban-American with Santander roots, died last February in New York, just three months before her 107th birthday. She worked as a clandestine artist, in the sense that she was one of the greats of geometric abstraction and modernism, although her recognition did not occur until the 21st century. She did not sell her first well-selling painting, as a star, until she was 89.
Burés (Barcelona, 1964) explains that this ostracism, more than unfair, was due to the fact that, in the 1950s, art was completely dominated by men, and then, in the 1970s, the fashion of currents such as pop.
But finally an exhibition at the Whitney in New York brought her out of oblivion and she enjoyed the status of being one of the greats.
The Barcelona artist, who emerged shining in the Madrid of the movement with his jewels, especially with the hairpin from the film Matador that Pedro Almodóvar released in 1986, speaks with true reverence of Herrera, whom he met in 2010 and with the who cooperated.
One of the fruits of that relationship is part of the exhibition of 25 of his jewels (until May 18, 2024), in the library of the Society of the Americas, in Manhattan.
After El Dorado , an exhibition at the New York headquarters of that organization that explores this myth of the city of gold from the pre-Hispanic period to contemporary times, Burés now emerges as a brooch and his Art as ornament , the title of this project in which his collaboration with Latin American artists is reflected.
In addition to Herrera, among those alliances with the master jeweler are Tony Bechara (Puerto Rican), the Argentines Julio Le Parc, César Paternosto, Marie Orensanz, Antonio Asis and Horacio García Rossi, the Brazilians Macaparana and Sérvulo Esmeraldo, or the Cuban Kcho, who , according to Burés, has disappeared from the map of success after selling out to Castroism.
During the tour, he explains each of his pieces of jewelry (bracelets, pendants, necklaces), which he defines as “small sculptures.” Although he trained as an interior designer, a jeweler friend asked him for help and changed his direction. He had always been fascinated by how African tribes used jewelry, because they wore it on one arm or the other, its symbology. He saw that in that field he could unite his passion for design and interest in art. But the trigger was his work with Louise Bourgeois, another artist crowned at a mature age.
This exhibition, he clarifies, is only a brief glimpse of the part of his work that highlights the importance that this collaboration represents for him. This allows him to develop “the most experimental part of his work,” he emphasizes. “It is the field in which I enjoy the most,” he adds. He assures that, if someone comes and gives him a drawing to make a piece of jewelry, “he tells them to go to a workshop,” he remarks.
Because everything about him arises from conversations with those artists and their intention to give a physical form to those dialogues. It is a way to obtain unconventional results and explore avenues of creativity.
He maintains that a designer tends to have a more industrial vision, he has to think “about production, about weight, about whether a piece of jewelry can be worn and is affordable,” he insists. “All these industry parameters don't exist when you work with an artist,” she remarked. “It stimulates me a lot – he clarifies – to develop pieces without those factors, with different dimensions.”
