Antonio Ballester’s work is focused on painting. It evolves around iconographies closely linked to the quotidian and to the primary expression of nature. In the realm of representation, his images are as scarce, essential. They depict suns, rain, trees, plants, mountains or moons, which are treated by truly austere means.

Alongside his artistic work, Ballester has invested a great deal of time and efforts in thorough research on pedagogy and participatory processes that have occasionally taken the shape of an exhibition. His solo show at La Casa Encendida or his inclusion in the last São Paulo Biennial are good examples of this. In these exhibitions, his own artistic work was shown alongside the result of the workshops he organized with kids belonging to different contexts and social strata. In the same space as his paintings, one could see watercolours, collages or clay and wooden sculptures, just to name a few of the many languages they dealt with.

A few months ago, Museo Patio Herreriano invited Antonio Ballester to visit Archivo Ferrant, one the gems of the Colección Arte Contemporáneo, housed in this museum. Ballester focused on Ferrant’s pedagogical procedures. In 1931, Ferrant published an immensely relevant text, ‘Diseño para una configuración escolar’, that brought down many of the conventions around pedagogy so firmly rooted in academic artistic teaching. Javier Arnaldo, one of the most relevant experts on Ferrant, explains that the artist soon adopted a “non-authoritarian position based on the principle of expressive freedom” that he designed in three phases. The first one, that of initiation, was focused on experimentation and games with forms and materials. The following two would be an examination of the transition between intuition and knowledge. Ferrant’s text was never actually set in motion by Spain’s public administration but it remained key evidence of the duality between the artistic creation he defended and the pedagogical dynamics required by art that structured his thinking.

In 1935, Ferrant designed small pieces of an array of cardboard pieces. Some were made following basic geometric patterns while others were more complex and capricious. Ferrant suggested the young pupils freely create shapes in a combinatory exercise. These small cardboard pieces and the exercises were called “Arsintes”, which is the blend of two concepts: “art” and “synthesis”. There were 11 groups of cardboard pieces but Ferrant used mainly 4 of them. He gave each of these 4 groups the following titles. “Ánfora”, “Grotesco”, “Armazón”, “Maniquí”. They now give their names to the title of our exhibition.

Some of these little cardboard shapes are now the leitmotiv of our exhibition, or, rather, of the museography of our exhibition. Designed by local carpenter Jesús Morejón, the wooden plinths that are scattered around the exhibition space follow the patterns devised by Ferrant in his “Arsintes”. On these pedestals, Ferrants’s sculptures, drawings, photographs and archival material are shown alongside different drawings, paintings, sculptures or object made by the kids that participated in the many workshops conducted by Antonio Ballester, an artist for whom art and pedagogy were, as Ferrant also held, one very same topic. Ferrant’s “Arsintes”, are now, 85 years afterwards, reinterpreted by the contemporary concerns of Antonio Ballester’s take on artistic education. His workshops with kids in Madrid, Mexico or Brazil, just to name only a few of the many different contexts he has worked in, evince the close ties between the two artists.

Both artists’ common concerns around pedagogy find an echo on the austere nature of their artistic work. This is visible in Ferrants’s 1949 outstanding “Maternity”, a brilliant version of the well-known iconography of the Virgin with Son. Ballester shares his fascination with this subject for it is the theme in which childhood has been most vividly depicted throughout all eras. The synthesis to which all works by Ballester are also submitted is also related to the youngsters’ schematic way of looking and making while simultaneously addressing to an interest in primitivism also shared by Ferrant.

‘Ánfora, Grotesco, Armazón, Maniquí. An Exhibition on Pedagogy’ can be seen in Rooms 6 and 7. The former can be considered an exhibition in its own right, while the latter takes pedagogy from the scenographic to the real, with tables realized by carpenter Morejón also following Ferrant’s designs on which children of varied ages will work in the various workshops programmed for this occasion. ‘Ánfora, Grotesco, Armazón, Maniquí’ therefore shows our commitment to revise one of the most beautiful moments in the relationship between Art and Pedagogy in Spain’s recent history.