Enric Majoral

Enric Majoral The expanded jewellery

Enric Majoral The Expanded Jewellery

“ Craftsmanship is not just about working with your hands, but with your hands, intelligence, technique and heart.”

Enric Majoral

Formentera and Enric Majoral, craftsmanship and design 4 Pilar Vélez

Enric Majoral, jeweller 30 Maia Creus

Formentera, from the house-workshop to the shop-workshop38 Formentera – Barcelona – Formentera 46 His encounter with contemporary jewellery 64 Shape-jewellery 72 Image-jewellery 76 Capelletes 78 Cuconets and Bajoques 86 Container-jewellery 94 Trossos de Formentera 98 Woollen jewellery 102 Posidònia, organic jewellery 104 Needle and thread 108 Coming and going, divorced from method 118 Àfrica 124 To grow or to shrink 126 Joies de sorra 128 Bronze, a side project 142 Drawn jewellery 154 Retorn a Formentera 162 The gesture, the jeweller’s mode of activity 170 Taller 2000, innovation and craftsmanship 184 Roc Majoral, everything learned at home 186 The beginning of uncertainty, a form of creativity 214 Naming the collections 224 Monochrome in Majoral jewellery 228 Expanded jewellery 230

The sea below is the same as that above 244 Pilar Bonet

Enric Majoral, materiality 248 Martín Azúa

Textos en castellano 252 Collections 1982–2020 270 Enric Majoral – Roc Majoral, biographies

Index

278

Pendants Capelletes 1996-1997 Silver and gold

12

13

Object Pots 2004 Patinated bronze

Earrings Africana 2010 Gold (Roc Majoral)

20

21

Bracelet Volta 2017 Gold (Roc Majoral)

The idea of the workshop as a social space has accompanied Enric Majoral’s professional career since its inception. Here, creative practice has a philosophical place: experience understood as a trade, a way of knowing that is the way of learning.

Knowledge is work, production and shared experiences. Community and creation.

In the mid-1980s, La Mola was a cultural space in a state of increasing complexity. Craftsmen, artists, designers and architects lived there in search of new experiences and other ways of seeking out the new, such as the disruption of their practices and how they understood their work. From this dispersed community, in 1984, the idea arose to produce a space for communication, the Art and Crafts Fair. Enric Majoral was one of its promoters. Right next to the fairgrounds, Majoral opened his first workshop selling directly to the public. Fourteen years later, in 1998, also near the historic fairgrounds, Majoral unveiled an emblematic architectural complex consisting of three inter-related volumes: a welcome portico, escorted on both sides by the jewellery workshop and a shop selling directly to the public. This workshop-shop is currently a tourist destination and one of the cultural landmarks of Formentera.

44

“ My father was a leather craftsman.

He had a workshop-shop that sold directly to the public. When I wanted to hide away, I went there. Somehow, I reproduced this model.”

45

Bracelet 1984–1986 Blued silver

Container-jewellery With Gabietes (Small cages), Enric Majoral closed a long period that began with Capelletes, focused on the poetic perception of space. Spaces of experience that give rise to images of great narrative intensity. Images that breathe, turned into jewellery through a deliberately austere and essential object language. What these pieces have in common is the concept of the receptacle.

Houses of the soul, of life, of seeds. Containers that generate content because they call for experiences of recollection and permanence.

Pendant Gabietes 1998 Gold and natural posidonia

94

123

Pendant 2000 Silver, gold, white coral and acrylic paint

Objects Pots 2005 Bronze / Silver and paint

146

147

Craftsmanship evolves as it incorporates the technological innovations of each era and culture.

The Majoral workshop has evolved with this axiom in mind, which Roc Majoral has placed at the heart of his work there, first as a jeweller by trade and later as an artist.

In 2000, Roc Majoral took over managing the workshop, divided between staff jewellers and small workshops of professional local jewellers who know Majoral’s style and way of working very well. At the same time, he created his own space for creativity within the Majoral company (Filiferro, 2002-2010), where he produced his jewellery and collections. It is in this context that he overhauled the old Majoral workshop. New workbenches were brought in and technologies were added that improve ergonomic working conditions, metal recycling and the streamlining of the entire production process, with the incorporation of laser, micro-fusion and electrolysis bath technologies, 3D techniques to create prototypes and precious stone insertion, now undertaken by Roc Majoral. The Majoral workshop can currently take on all phases of jewellery production, from drawing and concept to packaging, labelling and shipping to market.

In the world of Majoral jewellery, a close view can identify a certain style that describes Roc Majoral’s way of working. It can be summed up by a deep sense of harmony that runs through all his collections, both those that display a formal language inspired by elements of nature and the landscape and those that draw on urban culture.

Roc Majoral’s jewellery expresses a sensitivity closer to the line and movement of the jewellery than to its volume. He often works from the idea of multiplicity: from a form, a small single piece, he builds a whole structure. The initial piece repeated in different ways creates a chain of events producing the typologies of an entire collection.

Taller 2000, innovation and craftsmanship

184

185

Necklace Bombolles 2002 Silver and plastic (Roc Majoral and Abril Ribera)

Roc Majoral’s jewellery and collections generally have two starting points: an intellectual stimulus and a sensitive stimulus that undergoes a meticulous process of research, analysis and experimentation. Nevertheless, these two different starting points will unify over the creative time that precedes the final form.

For example, the Pluja (Rain) collection springs from the idea of making jewellery with a seemingly dismembered and disorganised structure; a kind of “confetti” jewellery that provokes the perceptual experience of a certain dematerialisation while its structure generates space and volume at the same time. The highly poetic result of this collection does not contradict its origin focused on a purely technical issue. This is the hallmark that defines the creative path taken by Roc Majoral.

Bracelet Pluja 2007 Gold, black diamonds and nylon (Roc Majoral and Abril Ribera)

202

203

Necklace Pluja 2007 Gold and nylon (Roc Majoral and Abril Ribera)

Since its etymological origins, the word expansion literally meant “a necessary overflow or emanation”. Modern science has defined expansion as a cosmological constant. Contemporary creative poetics has combined the idea of expanding with the experience of the intimate immensity of the expansion of being. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that today the idea of expanded creation crosses almost all branches of knowledge and procedures.

Expansion speaks to us of creative multiplicity, of blurring the boundaries of disciplines, of undoing methodological boundaries and of new ways of meaning. The idea of expanded creativity runs through the creative production of the 20th century and has therefore completely affected the jewellery sector. Enric Majoral’s creations take part in this sign of the times while, in his case, talking about expanded jewellery refers not only to the workshop, overflowing with tradition, methods, materials, tools and concepts. Added to this explosion of elements, Majoral’s jewellery has been affected by other expansive energies such as the attraction for remote time, the assumption of the telluric forces of nature, slow observation of the world around him and the dynamic dialogue between the human body and jewellery unfolding in space and time.

Enric Majoral, jewellery in action In Enric Majoral’s symbolic universe, a piece of jewellery does not reach its full expressive potential until it inhabits a human body. We are not talking about the necessary formal ergonomics that jewellery must have, but about a dynamic fusion between the life of the materials, the life of the forms and the life of feeling alive in a human body. Jewellery in transit; jewellery in relation. The jewellery opening up to the infinite time and space of indeterminacy, the improvisation of life in action.

In Enric Majoral’s creative journey, the idea of expanded jewellery opens a new chapter when he comes into contact with the world of fashion and its theatricality on the catwalk. Following his custom of recreating the established canons, Majoral gives the scale and vital movement of the human body to jewellery, while incorporating the space of ritual and the time of performative action into the clothing sector. We speak of the encounter between jewellery and the body transformed into two driving powers in action; of a knot of living meanings unfolding in the limited and concrete space and time of the here and now.

Time of presence. Living place.

Putting jewellery into action involves opening up an unreleased and infinite space of perceptions.

Movement works as a binding agent. The cross between movement, jewellery and the body gives rise to an unprecedented perceptual experience.

The body and jewellery are no longer in space but generate space; they are space. The spatiality of the body is the unfolding of the fact that it is a body, just as the spatiality of the jewellery is the unfolding of the fact that it is jewellery. Body and jewellery in motion and in direct contact teach us another form of knowledge: a knowledge rooted in the space of existence, which is the space of life feeling alive.

Expanded jewellery

230

231

Small shawl Escates 2018 Silver and silver plating in 18 carat gold

Necklace Serp 2016 Silver

240

241

2009

2010

Retorn a Formentera Silver, gold and paint

Pauma Silver, gold and fan palm

pp. 162-169

pp. 214-215

Olives Gold and porcelain p. 217

Plans Silver (Roc Majoral and Abril Ribera)

Tonga Silver / Gold (Roc Majoral and Abril Ribera)

Samurai Blued silver and gold (Roc Majoral and Abril Ribera)

p. 193

Fiji Gold and chrome diopside (Roc Majoral and Abril Ribera) p. 192

Pop Silver and plastic (Roc Majoral and Abril Ribera)

Drac Silver (Roc Majoral and Abril Ribera)

Porcellana Gold and porcelain pp. 22, 218-219

Fruits Silver, spray paint and gold (Roc Majoral and Abril Ribera) pp. 194-195

Papallones Silver / Gold (Roc Majoral and Abril Ribera)

2009–2013

274

2011

2012

2013

Blanca Silver and electrostatic paint (Roc Majoral and Abril Ribera) pp. 190-191

Aire Silver / Gold p. 207

Eivissa Silver and gold / Silver p. 221

Sakura Silver and electrostatic paint (Roc Majoral and Abril Ribera) pp. 200-201

Corona Blued silver, gold and diamonds

Perenne Silver / Gold (Roc Majoral and Abril Ribera)

Bombolles Gold / Silver Tresor Gold (Roc Majoral and Abril Ribera) pp. 208-209

Orígens Gold and diamonds (Roc Majoral and Abril Ribera) p. 199

Vida Gold and brilliants / Blued silver and gold (Roc Majoral and Abril Ribera) pp. 196-197

Baladre Silver / Gold p. 198

275

Collections 1982–2020

Bella Gold, coral and aquamarine (Roc Majoral)

We thank our children Savina and Roc Majoral Ballester for their unconditional support for Majoral project

Enric Majoral The Expanded Jewellery Published by Majoral and Actar Publishers Curator Maia Creus Coordinator Dolors Ballester Picanyol Main text Maia Creus with contributions from Martín Azúa, Pilar Bonet and Pilar Vélez Proofreading and translation textosBCN

Translation of the poem by Joan Brossa: Sumari Astral i altres poemes / Sumário Astral e outros poemas / Sumario Astral y otros poemas / Astral Summary and other poems into Portuguese and Spanish by Ronald Polito and Pere Galceran-Uyà, respectively, São Paulo: Amauta Ed., 2006; English translation (unpublished) by Dustin Langan and Jèssica Pujol; courtesy of the Fundació Joan Brossa.

Art direction Martín Azúa Graphic design Spread. David Lorente - Tomoko Sakamoto Photographs Martín Azúa, except Arxiu Majoral, pp. 34, 36-37, 127, 151, 271-277;

Jordi Sarrà, pp. 28-29, 143-149, 152-153, 231-243; Albert Font, 278 and endpapers Front cover Posidònia, 2019 Back cover Capelleta, 1996 Front endpaper Formentera Back endpaper Majoral workshop-shop in Formentera Preprint and Printing Gràfiques Ortells, Barcelona Printed on Arena White Smooth 140g by Fredigoni

All rights reserved © Of the edition, Majoral, 2021. Zamora 91, sobreàtic 3a, 08018 Barcelona © Of the texts, their authors © Of the images, their authors ISBN: 978-1-948765-88-6 Library of Congress Control Number: 2021932209 Distribution Actar D, Inc. New York, Barcelona.

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