Reliëf met portret van H.P. Berlage 1926

This terracotta relief of H.P. Berlage by De Porceleijne Fles is all about touch, you can see the marks of its making. There’s something beautiful about the directness of clay. It’s such an immediate material; you push, you pull, you add, you subtract. Look closely, and you’ll notice the artist’s fingerprints almost fossilized in the surface. I love how the artist hasn’t tried to smooth everything out. You can see the little cracks and crevices, the imperfections that give it so much character. The modelling is very expressive, see the rough texture of the beard and how it contrasts with the smoother planes of the face. It feels almost like a drawing in three dimensions. It has that playful tension between representation and abstraction. It reminds me a bit of some of Picasso's ceramic experiments, where he was just letting the material do its thing. Ultimately, art is just one big conversation across time. It’s all about responding, reacting, and remixing. And what could be better than that?