A pilgrimage to The Exvotos
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In the old-town Sevillian neighbourhood of Feria, the rooftop terrace of artists Daniel Maldonado and Luciano Galán is a serene and shady retreat. Swallows dart between the buildings, flowers sprout from a hodgepodge of vintage vessels, and the sound of church bells fills the air. “It reminds you that the Virgin Mary was conceived without sin,” suggests Maldonado of the midday peal – a call to the Angelus prayer, which rings out as we sit on chairs upholstered in old grain sacks, canopied by a chic concertinaed awning.
Across the southern Spanish city, Catholic devotion to the Madonna is visible at every turn, from posters and tiled plaques to museum masterpieces. It’s also written large across the townhouse that Maldonado and Galán bought three years ago. Behind its gleaming-white façade and pseudo-lace “curtains” – painted onto the window panes – versions of the Virgin abound. A trio of antique carved figures watch over the living room. A large and dramatic 17th-century painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe – based on a Mexican apparition of Mary – presides over the stairwell. In the entranceway, one of their own depictions is dramatically augmented by a gold-painted baroque frame. It’s all part of their shared creative and spiritual endeavour: The Exvotos.
“It was our clients that named us,” explains Galán of the moniker, which refers to the votive offerings placed in churches or places of pilgrimage. For the past 23 years, the couple have crafted their own versions – delicately carved and painted wooden figures steeped in religious symbology, four of which are displayed in glass bell jars atop a hallway cupboard. The full extent of their artistic output, however, is revealed in their ground-floor atelier.
Entered via an antique doorway, whose grandiose columns have been exuberantly painted and patterned by the two men, their creative quarters are part by-appointment showroom, part busy ceramics workshop. It’s a two-man production line of colourful wares, where their signature head-shaped vessels are individually moulded and piles of plates are handpainted. Whether they are making petite, dimpled candlestick-holders or monumental decorative obelisks, each piece is enamelled, glazed and fired on-site before being shipped across the world.
“Our work life is very closely linked to our personal life,” says Galán, wearing a well-worn apron with his name embroidered in one corner. Underneath, his T-shirt reveals a slogan: “Dear me, Thank you for putting in the work” – a saying Galán attributes to Spanish billionaire businessman Amancio Ortega Gaona, co-founder of the Inditex fashion group that owns the Zara retail chain. It seems an unlikely source of inspiration for their idiosyncratic business, but speaks volumes about their work ethic.
“Our concept of life is the convent motto Ora et Labora, which means pray and work,” he says. “In the broadest sense of the word, praying is meditating, reflecting, thinking, abstracting and developing creativity. And working… well, it is carrying out all our fantasies. We are like a pair of nuns – with beards! We are obsessed with nuns.”
The grand casa-palacio that houses both the studio and their home above it dates back to the 1700s but was rebuilt from the foundations up in the 1900s, keeping the original brick facade and implementing an iron structure in the style of Gustave Eiffel. When The Exvotos moved in, the building was structurally sound but “aesthetically, it was a disaster”, says Galán. “The living room looked like it belonged to Dracula! Very dark, with big dramatic chairs.”
The previous inhabitants were two sisters who also had an ecclesiastical leaning. “It was their job to dress the Christ of the [nearby] Basílica de Jesús del Gran Poder, created by the famous sculptor Juan de Mesa in the 1600s,” says Galán of the figure that features prominently in Seville’s famed Good Friday processions. “They kept his clothes in a room upstairs and when we moved in the chests with the clothes – and an old flamenco dress – were still there. We call it the Room of the All-Powerful Jesus.”
This top-floor space is now a guest room. The chests have been commandeered as coffee tables in a living room that, while laden with curiosities, still feels cosy, with slouchy sofas, crumbly bare-brick walls, colourful thread-bare rugs and Suzani textiles bought long ago in Istanbul.
Antiques are a passion: “We learn from them; we love what the passing of time does to materials,” says Galán of the pieces. “We are very good friends with the person that organises house clearances!” Some surprising elements were sourced at the local antiques market, including the furniture of an organ from a Sevillian convent, and parts of an altarpiece that are installed either side of a doorway.
There are artworks everywhere. Some are their own. In the lounge, for example, a pair of energetic abstract paintings are by Maldonado, while an architectural 3D cardboard cut-out is positioned above their bed. But there are other artists in the mix too, such as Sevillian abstract painter Manuel Salinas and Francisco Díaz de Córdoba, whose small figurative paintings from the 1970s are signed San Valentin.
The couple’s fascination with iconography stems from growing up in villages around Seville where the church was ever present. “We would buy sweets from the convent,” recalls Galán. “We saw women who, aside from their religion, were very dignified, very spiritual, and that had an impact on us.” Even before they banded together as The Exvotos, the two men found themselves in monastic service: Galán restoring the handcrafted ceiling of a convent in the city of Utrera, south-east of Seville, and Maldonado restoring the tiles of Seville’s Santa Paula convent.
They seemed destined to meet. The pair began their creative journey at the same art school in Seville – Galán learning wood and stone carving and Maldonado studying ceramics – but did not bump into each other until after graduation. “It was a crush at first sight,” says Maldonado. “A month after, we decided to set up a studio-workshop where each of us could develop our own art and craft, but we quickly began to put our hand in each other’s work.” It wasn’t long before they decided to “create an entity that would encompass and represent both of us”.
This ethos is all-encompassing. In their studio, huge room-dividing curtains are handpainted (a service they offer bespoke, with a textile collaboration in the works). In their first-floor living space, meanwhile, many of the walls bear their handiwork. In a small loo, a sketchily Delft-like repeat pattern is paired with a knobbly ceramic sink basin of their own making. The more subtle starred and daubed pattern in their bedroom is offset with numerous ex-voto paintings, many from Mexico; while the kitchen-dining room’s intricate leafy trellis creates a framework for their own plates – a new collection inspired by the porcelain designs imported by the East India Company between 1600 and 1800. They are often asked to paint clients’ walls too, and have brought their brushes to churches, country estates and the Marbella Club hotel, where for the past four years they have been revamping the rooms one by one.
At home, any plain walls that remain are earmarked for embellishment. “We’re always painting something somewhere,” says Galán of their baroque approach to decoration. “The building work was finished last September and since then, every single weekend, the only thing we do is paint.
“We have not finished the project; all our spaces are in constant evolution,” he continues. “We’re always thinking of new projects. We’ve got more in our heads than we could ever possibly realise. The bad thing about there only being two of us is that there’s a limit to what we can do.”
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