Looking before drawing
Claudia Fernández and Martí Capdevila share a way of beginning: before drawing anything, they spend time in the space. They watch how the light arrives, where people walk, what they use and what they leave aside. Only afterwards, and often in a hurry, does the object appear.
This conversation took place one November afternoon, over cold coffee and without a script. It starts from a seemingly simple question —what happens before the object exists?— and drifts towards light, small needs and what it really means for something to be simple.
There is also an underlying conversation about the craft: how you decide a piece is finished, what you learn from the ones that didn’t work, and why the best decision is often to add nothing. Neither of them has definitive answers, and it shows.
The text has been lightly edited for reading. The questions are by Martí Capdevila; the answers, by Claudia Fernández.
When you start a project, what do you do first? And is it always the same, or does it depend on whether the commission is a house, a shop or a single piece?
I look. I spend hours in the space without drawing anything, to see where the light reaches at each hour of the day and where people walk when they don't know you are watching. It isn't always the same, but it almost always begins like this, because what you draw afterwards only makes sense if you have first understood what happens in there.
Often the most useful drawing is the one you don't make: a wall you decide not to touch, a window you leave as it is.
And then, how does the object arrive? Is there a moment when you feel something needs to be added?
Late, and in a hurry. First there is a small need: somewhere to leave the keys, a light to read by in bed, a surface for the cup that you don't have to think about. The object is the simplest answer you can find to that need, and often it already existed, only it wasn't well resolved.
Does simpler mean poorer? Simplicity is often mistaken for a lack of ambition.
Quite the opposite. It means nothing is left over, and that is far harder than adding things. A simple piece has been through many versions you never see: each decision it makes looks obvious only because you have discarded ten others.
That's why I care so much about the final moment, when you no longer know what to take away. That is when I know the object is finished.
How do you decide a piece is finished?
When I stop wanting to touch it. It isn't certainty, it is more of a silence: I look at it for a few days and nothing occurs to me that would improve it. If after a week it still seems right, I let it be.
Do you remember a piece that didn't work? What did you learn from it?
Many. A light I designed for a corner which, once installed, cast a shadow exactly where people wanted to leave their books. It took me a while to accept that the problem wasn't the light but that I hadn't looked at the corner properly. Since then I go back to the space before I consider anything closed.
Do you work alone or with other people? How does the process change when two of us are looking at the same thing?
It depends on the day. When I work alone I'm slower but I doubt less; when there are two of us we talk a lot and the conversation acts as a mirror: you say out loud something you thought you had clear and, suddenly, it sounds different.
That's why I like conversations like this one: not to reach any conclusion, but because they force you to put words to things that are normally just done.
And materials? Do you start from the material, or does it arrive at the end?
It arrives in the middle. First I know what the object has to do; then I ask the material what it wants to do. A metal, a wood, a glass each have ways of saying no to your ideas; listening to that no isn't losing control, it's avoiding making something you'll have to justify later.
Is there anything you would never draw?
Nothing I can't explain without the adjective "beautiful". If I need to say it's beautiful in order to defend it, I probably don't yet know why it's there.
What changes when a piece stops being yours and becomes the buyer's?
I stop deciding. Something made for a specific space begins to live another life, in a kitchen or a hallway I've never seen, and in that other life it adapts or it doesn't.
I like to think a good piece is one that allows uses you hadn't foreseen, even the wrong ones.
To finish: if you had to sum up everything we've said in a single sentence?
That looking properly is half the work, and the other half is having the courage not to add anything else.