Antonio Ballester Moreno, Museo Patio Herreriano de Valladolid

February 10, 2020

Antonio Ballester's work, fundamentally pictorial, starts from iconographies linked to everyday life and to the primary expression of nature. Suns, rain, trees, plants, mountains or moons are elements represented following schematic, essential and austere procedures.

Since the beginning of his career, Antonio Ballester's artistic work has been accompanied by an inclination for pedagogy and participatory processes that, sometimes, have been part of his public presentations, as could be seen in his exhibition at La Casa Encendida in Madrid or in the last edition of the Sao Paulo Biennial, one of the most relevant events on the international calendar. In these exhibitions, his own work was shown together with the results of the workshops he carried out with children from very different contexts and social strata, and thus, along with his varied format paintings, watercolors and collages or mud mushrooms, wooden ducks appeared and free and lit chromatic pottery.

A few months ago, the Patio Herreriano Museum sent an invitation to Antonio Ballester to study the Ferrant Archive, which is part of the Contemporary Art Collection. The artist focused his interest on Ferrant's pedagogical methodologies, which in 1931 published a highly relevant text entitled “Design of a school configuration”, which came to overthrow many of the pedagogical conventions rooted for so many years in artistic teaching In our country. As Javier Arnaldo, one of the highest authorities in Ferrant's artistic and pedagogical work, explains, the artist advocated “non-authoritarian training based on the principle of expressive freedom” with a system divided into three phases. The first of them, or initiation course, would be based on "experimentation and play with forms and materials"; the second and third would explore the transition between intuition and knowledge. Ferrant's text, Arnaldo continues, was never implemented by any public body, but it is an important confirmation of the “symbiosis between the sense of artistic creation that persuaded him and the learning dynamics required by art” that forged all his thinking.