Somieres Collection Ceramic Artwork by Alberto Hernández, 1999

Great work of the important ceramic artist Alberto Hernandez, signed and dated. Made on metal and cane structure. All this process was filmed in his day in the documentary ''Painting with fire'' showing the adaptation that Hernandez has made of the raku technique in his work, by adding an intermediate step: the direct contact with the flames to obtain the pictorial result. With this procedure, Hernández has managed to create large paintings in one piece. Known are his ''somieres'', paintings made from a metallic base in which he has embedded the clay in its holes to obtain a surface on which to paint and has heated it until the desired temperature is obtained.

In the artist's words about his work Somieres:

For quite some time I have worked with old bedsteads, I was interested at that time in the stories that the objects could contain. Human stories, naturally. The bedsteads, in addition to that burden, represented the possibility of using large format supports without fragmentation. The problem at that time was twofold: on the one hand there was the technical issue. Working on a large surface at 980º C was very risky, not only physically, but also from the point of view of the result, since a lot of surface had to be covered in a very short time and there was not always a happy ending. On the other hand, they made me very tired, because during the realization process I could not avoid thinking about the story that had accumulated the object, especially when the bed base had belonged to people very close, even my own parents. That is why I have not used these supports for a long time, although I would like to face this challenge again in the future.