Pascale Zintzen is a very sweet woman. She is also very strong, like the pieces that she creates with her hands and that have the texture of chamotte, a rough and telluric stoneware. She transmits as much warmth as the oven she lights at night. She is sometimes fragile like porcelain, so far removed from her creative language. She is an artist, full-time mom of two, and a survivor. All three are.
“My children have gotten used to collecting dirt for me, it is fun for them to search, collect and sift. My friends also bring me clay from many places. I love that it is a shared process,” he explains in his house in Poblenou, which is also his workshop. She herself crushes and sifts the material that she will later shape with her hands. “Sometimes there are remains of plants, traces of the territory that I leave as memories in my pieces.”
Ceramics have taught him the art of acceptance: “Pieces can change based on a mistake, like this buffalo, I didn’t expect this red stain, but that makes it even more buffalo, my children say. Every time you open the oven it is a surprise. Then you have to accept what hasn’t worked, what you didn’t expect…” Next to the unexpected buffalo that seems splashed with blood, another one in yellowish ocher, “more typical of my work, the color of the land next to my country house,” explains the artist.
Next to the oven in which he bakes his creations and which works at 1,220 degrees every night, rest the drums of his eldest son, Marius, 10 years old, and the guitar of Billy, who at 9 years old is already preparing the first concert he will give with his friends. friends.
Pascale’s grandmother was a pianist and she herself started playing when she was 4 years old. She finished her music studies in Liege, “but I didn’t like the rigidity of the conservatory,” explains the Belgian artist. She was also her grandmother to whom she went with her mother’s concerns “when she thought that she was not doing well with Marius and Billy; She always told me: are they bored? Well, fine, let them be bored.” Now we have just sold the piano, because “she didn’t play it anymore, she couldn’t find time” and she has bought a mini skate ramp for her children to enjoy in the country house they have in El Perelló.
The life of this family of three takes place between Barcelona and Tarragona. The connection with the countryside is very important for them. It helped them find refuge and reconnect with serenity, after a relationship marked by sexist violence. “Art has always existed in my life, but so many years dedicated to someone else’s problems had reduced me to myself. Now, my artistic expression is also a therapy,” he reveals.
In his workshop he also paints and makes tapestries. He delves into the theme of women, of mothers in the domestic environment, “of her responsibility to feed and drink; As Louise Bourgeois said, the mother who is a house.” Pascale’s women take the form of jugs. Vessels that provide food and life. From the Greek word for house comes the name of her workshop, Oikos. Last Christmas, her children gave her a house-shaped candle. “They are very mature and take good care of me, but they still believe in the magic of Santa Claus.”
“In some way,” she reflects, “I spend the day at home, alone or with my children, but on the other hand it gives me the great opportunity to be able to work a lot here in my workshop. I have the discipline to work every day, even if it is an hour or a half. The problem is also a solution, because your own room is in your soul.”
He studied Fine Arts and Archeology: “I did three or four excavations in Syria and Crete. The beauty of domestic, everyday ceramics caught my attention. My work and inspiration comes a lot from all this.” It’s not difficult to make the connection between his buffalo and the labyrinth’s minotaur. “They are sculptures with a magical and protective point.” Also the houses she made for Kave Home are like totems of ancient cultures, an organic and living work.
“Clay is a poor, basic, lifelong material. You buy a block and you can work with it, you don’t need anything else… except an oven to give it resistance. She dreams of making gigantic pieces in Mallorca with Pere Coll, “a legend who works for Barceló. He is so humble and does such great things at the same time… I would like to sign up for the children in a school there and go to work for a month or two or six with that great teacher and his great oven.”
Another of her dreams “is to make ceramic bags for Jacquemus. I love his sincerity, his way of coming from nothing and becoming great, his interest in art and crafts. I write to you on Instagram every month. He hasn’t answered me yet, but I’m sure one day he will.” At the moment, the clothing brand Sessún Alma has already placed a large order for buffaloes for its stores; She exhibits and sells at the Corazón hotel in Mallorca, “an establishment for two artists and very much for artists,” and is preparing an exhibition for October at the Menorcan gallery Ethesian.
She also uses her energy to work for Doctors Without Borders and to restore her “little house,” as she calls it. “It had to be saved or sold. When I asked the bricklayers to teach me her techniques, they looked at me strangely, it is a very masculine world, but I told them not to worry, that mine was art, and they relaxed. Now I work with brick and monolayer. “I want to integrate craftsmanship into the house, like the sculptor and ceramist Valentine Schlegel, who for me is God.”
When she creates, Pascale does not listen to music, but rather traditional radio or podcasts about art, psychology or feminism, in French. She has excellent Spanish, although she assures that “the level of concentration that Spanish requires of me does not allow me to work, but I will soon achieve it.”
He received the best support from his grandfather. “He simply told me: ‘I trust you.’ “More than advice, it was giving me strength.” If only she could transmit a lesson to her children, she wants it to be that there are no limits, “that they are capable of whatever they set their minds to. You should never clip their wings.” And she reflects: “We are happy. “We all have dark moments, but the decision to go towards the light, towards a healthy life, we must not let it be taken away from us.”
