I finally attended—a newly opened faculty in Rio de Janeiro, the first of its kind in Latin America; at the time I was also beginning to discover art, through the need I felt to ask myself about the material I’d been gathering for years. Industrial design helped me to form this methodical approach, to adopt a global vision of the elements I was working with, and above all introduced an economy of means and methods in colours and shapes, with the need to go straight to the heart of the matter, to work with the basic, primary material, without worrying about ‘decorating’ or ‘concealing’ what is in itself purely nature. It was there that I also first encountered the idea that form follows function, the Bauhaus principle par excellence, which led to ergonomics, itself a kind of dialogue between people and objects, and to the mutual interaction of the former. It was a time that brought with it many special experiences. […] [T]he atmosphere during those years was one of constant friction and turmoil, there was a tremendous interest in culture and our generation simply reflected the dynamics of the period and the country. I began to use the faculty workshops for my works of sculpture and the dean, Carmen Portinho, a well-known art critic and also director of the Museum of Modern Art, who was later to urge me to participate in the São Paulo Biennale, let me have the key to the faculty so that I could work at weekends. I am aware that some people were highly critical with my stance, since they thought that a designer had no business with art. They were right in a way, because it’s hard to work with functional and non-functional works at the same time, art not having to fulfil any strictly specific function. But this is the place for aesthetics, which obviously I don’t consider to be a mere theory of beauty (or of ugliness, as some would have it), but as a theory of the qualities of feeling, linked to emotional activities. However, I think that being able to think in different ways at the same time is always enriching, and the Bauhaus itself included well-known artists amongst its teaching staff. … Throughout the whole of the time spent conversing with Fernando, I felt as if were gradually becoming part of the visceral circuits of wood, of the inhabited beltways of the film of polyester, of the instantaneous narration of the unexpected vision. My existence during each of these days of observation, investigation and communicative exchange increasingly led me towards the interior of Casás’s work, where I now live as an implied receiver. And I do so stimulated by the pleasure of a new curiosity, that of the process and the outcome of his next intervention, the organisation of his world in the exhibition spaces of the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, which will doubtlessly seduce me with further proposals of enjoyment, unease and open dialogue. Excerpted version of an interview with the artist by Xosé María Álvarez Cáccamo (to be published in the forthcoming exhibition catalogue Fernando Casás: o agora xa foi e o denantes será).
Fernando Casás: o agora xa foi e o denantes será, exhibition view, CGAC, 2012