Fernando Alcalde

Fernando Alcalde was born in Cuenca in 1958 and became a ceramicist almost by accident. As a history student, he joined a class trip to the workshop of Adrián Navarro - and that changed everything. Fernando dropped history, enrolled at the Higher School of Ceramics in Manises, and after graduating opened his own workshop in the historic centre of Cuenca, on Calle Alfonso VIII.

For over forty years he has worked with stoneware, an exceptionally dense and hard high-fired ceramic, and porcelain, which he considers the noblest but also the most temperamental of all ceramic materials. His signature is Oriental glazes. He studied the Chinese tradition of glazing and mastered something that is genuinely hard to achieve: transparency, chromatic depth, and gentle colour transitions.

Then there's red. In the Chinese tradition, it's one of the trickiest colours to work with: it comes from copper oxide, which shifts to grey, brown or green at the slightest change in kiln temperature or atmosphere. Chinese red glazes have historically been considered rare - but Fernando Alcalde pulls them off.

His favourite form is the cylinder. He endlessly varies the relationship between height and diameter, finding different proportions and personalities in each piece. From cylinders come vases, cups, bowls, plates, trays. And then all of this gets shown - not just in his workshop, but in Madrid, Barcelona, Milan, Paris and Frankfurt.

If you want to visit Fernando Alcalde's workshop-shop in Cuenca, pay attention. There's no sign - just an easy-to-miss door on Calle Alfonso VIII in the old town, about 80 metres from the arch leading to Plaza Mayor.