OCTOBER – NOVEMBER 2025 / WINGED SYMPHONY / Béatriz Garrigo, ceramist by Anna Galet, photos Laurine Paumard
In the Perthus mountains, birds dialogue with plants and lizards.
Beatriz Garrigo poaches these moments of grace, then immortalizes them on canvas or in clay. His poetic works are exhibited at La Maison de Commerce in Paris and at the OΔK Oneofakind Gallery in Toulouse.
In her lair in the Albères, where the Pyrenees go to the sea, Beatriz Garrigo creates.
Since her childhood in Barcelona, raised in the wake of her mother, a seamstress, painter and ceramist, she has known the jubilation of doing with her hands and playing with paint. “Some children dreamed of the sea or the mountains, I went to the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona,” she says with a laugh. At the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona, in the 1970s, just after the death of her father, she embarked on an academic work that she has never stopped – on the sign and on the line. After exploring great variations around the flora of the Amazon and on the roads of South America, she settled in France, in the Pyrénées-Orientales, on the Franco-Spanish border, on this land so quiet that it was attached to the clay.
Because in this wild mountain range, orioles, robins, dragonflies and lizards, intertwined with the vegetation, weave the patterns of a living tapestry every day. “In painting as in ceramics, the sources of inspiration are the same. Ceramic is just another medium, which brings volume. The art of clay, for this Catalan, is an atavism. “My grandfather and my mother chained old ceramics to the Puces et Encants in Barcelona. I have always lived surrounded by dishes, pitchers and other glazed stoneware. Today, Beatriz constantly moves from one medium to another, capturing on the canvas or in the red earth of La Bisbal the emergence of the marvellous at the heart of everyday life. “I try to express the magic of the moment.” A magic that has seduced galleries and museum curators, in Collioure, Perpignan, Toulouse, but also in Paris, at the headquarters of UNESCO, where Beatriz has participated in major group exhibitions.
The Maison de Commerce de Paris, with whom she has been collaborating for a long time, is offering her a double exhibition this year, mixing paintings and ceramics.
“I wanted,” she confides, “to instill a little poetry in the harshness of the world.”
At what point does craftsmanship become art?
“I can’t say,” says Beatriz. But I remember that in the past, to escape from a noisy family, I used to take refuge in the tranquility of the Archaeology Museum of Barcelona. There were, in the display cases, small pieces of very old ceramics. For me, it was art. What makes the difference is the emotion. »
