Picasso’s relationship with ceramics is the result of a series of serendipitous events.

In 1946, when visiting the annual exhibition of pottery at Vallauris, he met Suzanne and Georges Ramie, owners of a small ceramics factory, called L’Atelier Madoura (the Madura workshop). Picasso, curious about everything, undertook his first attempts at ceramics. He decided to focus on this activity as it offered him new prospects for creation through the plasticity of the clay and the magic of firing that revealed brilliant glazed colours.

He was interested in creating different forms and objects that conveyed hidden meanings yet clearly bore the unique identity of the artist. Picasso’s works are characterized by the applications of material and drawings. Sinuous lines highlight faces and silhouettes of animals on vessels. These artifacts are not vessels but stories on plates, transformed by sudden brilliant revelations.

His practice is unorthodox. Picasso, the sculptor, shaped fauns and nymphs from slip, as if made out of bronze. He energetically decorated dishes and plates with his favorite themes (bullfights, women, owl, goat etc.) He used the most unexpected materials, including white earthenware which was left unglazed and decorated with relief elements. These results are particularly important because they are not the result of a search for effects but they stem from the extraordinary discovery of the effectiveness of a rapid yet composed gesture.

Ceramics was never a minor art for Picasso.

The thirty -three pieces exhibited here, made between 1952 and 1969 come from L’Atelier Madoura, the place that gave birth to his new magic. Starting with the round dishes "contaminated" by simplicity, bearing a quick engraved sign and with delicate embossed mark suggesting a moving scene: perhaps a facial transformation or maybe a bull-fight with a matador’s silhouette against the light, or a monochrome rendition of the final scene of a bullfight, while inside of a cup holds the spirit of Plaza de Toros.

Another plate hosts the rough profile of a goat while a dish is decorated with a dove. In all these circumstances it is not Picasso who enters the universe and the technical criteria of ceramics. The narrative possibilities of ceramics are used by Picasso to satisfy his rich creative background. The artist also produced tiles that are coloured with black engobe and carved. On the contrary, when it is an amphora that inspires the artist, it may engender an owl or a solar figure. In this manner, his fantasy world continued to expand to infinity.