The Exvotos

The Exvotos
Seville, Spain

The Exvotos is the work of two artists, Daniel Maldonado and Luciano Galán, who met in Seville and discovered they shared more than a city. Daniel trained in ceramics and Luciano in wood and stone carving, both at the Seville School of Arts, before apprenticing in professional workshops to learn the trade beyond the classroom. Daniel grew up in Arahal and Luciano in Utrera, two villages in the Seville countryside, and before The Exvotos their restoration work took in churches and convents, from a hand-crafted convent ceiling in Utrera to the tiles of Seville's Santa Paula convent. A month after meeting, they set up a shared studio. Within a year they had merged their separate practices into one.

Their workshop sits in the Macarena neighbourhood, one of Seville's oldest quarters, marked by a giant ceramic heart at the entrance and the sound of music drifting out, classical, sometimes Cuban, depending on what the work demands. Inside, terracotta heads in various stages of completion stare out from shelves alongside salvaged wooden furniture and glass bell jars the pair call fanales. The cabeza recipientes, container heads, are their best-known work: glazed ceramic vases shaped as faces, decorated with floral wreaths, drop earrings and the unmistakable mark of two hands working in tandem.

The heads began in Rome. In the Vatican Museums there is a room of ancient terracotta ex-votos, heads left as offerings to the gods, and it was there the idea took shape. Every piece starts as a pencil sketch, is modelled at a small scale until the proportions are right, and only then made at full size.

The name comes from "exvoto", an offering made to the gods in gratitude for favours received, a recurring motif in the popular religious art of Andalusia. It is a fitting name for work that draws on religion, theatre, nature and history in equal measure, filtered through two artists who have been doing this together for over twenty years. In their own words, what drives them is "beauty for beauty's sake, sincerity and the feeling that art will save the world."

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