Asier Mendizabal

Fundación CALOSA presents Trazo coactivo, a solo exhibition by Asier Mendizabal.

The project brings into dialogue two typographic paradigms from the 1930s: the stencil font developed by Robert Hunter Middleton in 1937, popularized through its military use and later appropriated by subcultures such as punk and hip hop due to its association with the logic of warfare; and the hollow typography conceived by Josef Albers at the Bauhaus in 1931, which has a radically different formal-pedagogical orientation. This confrontation suggests the coexistence of antagonistic visions within the same historical horizon, whose resonance is reactivated in the present.

Mendizabal transfers the principle of stenciling to the ceramic realm through the industrial extrusion of blocks that incorporate these typographic motifs. In these works, the manual gesture is subordinated to the pattern, yet it persists in the irregularities and cuts, evidencing a tension between control and deviation that recalls both the stenciling technique and its most remote antecedents: the hand silhouettes in prehistoric caves.

—Fundación CALOSA