Gustavo Pérez was born in 1950 in Mexico-city. He studied mathematics and philosophy there, before he started studying ceramics at the Escuola de Diseno y Artesias in 1971. He comes to the Netherlands in 1980 with a grant to study on at the Academy St. Joost in Breda where Johan van Loon is his tutor. In connection he stays until 1983 with the pottery monks of the St. Paulus Abdij in Oosterhout.
Since 1984 he works from his studio in Veracruz, from where he manages to spread his ceramics all over the world. We saw this work for the first time at the Ceramic Millennium Exhibition in Amsterdam in 1999 when it was exposed in the stand of the famous Frank Lloyd Gallery from Santa Monica in Californië.
A first exhibition of his ceramics followed in 2003, together with the work of Johan van Loon and Nicholas Homoky. In 2007 and 2009 he showed his work here again, now in a personal exhibition. Also in 2009 he was invited to work as ‘artist in residence’ at the ‘Sèvres, Cité de la Céramique” in Sèvres near Paris, one of the worlds most appreciated porcelain factories. The workshe designed there were exported all over the world.
Gustavo Pérez is an artist who has raised the creation of ceramics to pure spatial design. He knows to use the plastic qualities of the clay in a playful manner by manipulating the still soft clay through folding and pressing it together, thus creating jewels of sculptural form. He is a master too in decorating the pot’s surface. These abstract decorations consist of spatial dividing, line decoration and a combination of both. He makes use of glaze in the decoration but also of the bare unglazed shard of the crogged clay.
A chapter apart in the surface treatment of his pots is formed by the incised decoration drawings. Here his master ship on this material comes into full blossom. The incisions he makes with the scalping knife are of surgical precision and the subtle alternations with which he opens these incisions from inside out make the pot wand manifest itself almost as a human skin.