Ramón Esteve

This monographic exposition that the Valencian Institute of Modern Art dedicates to Ramón Esteve is organized in four areas: Study situates the visitor in terms of time and space, by means of a presentation of the architect and designer and a chronological resume of his twenty years of professional background. Architecture immerses us in the formal and creative universe of Esteve as an architect: panels, photographs, models, texts, plans and drafts demonstrate the visual language present in public buildings and private houses developed by the study. Design shows some of the most significant furniture pieces created by this multidisciplinary artist. Finally, the area Tenders is designed as an approach to the most recent projects of the study, presented by video projections and models.The title of the exposition, From the Architecture, gives an idea of the creative formulations of Ramón Esteve. In his work there is not place for the gratuitous composition or the fortuitous space. On the contrary, it is the topographic adaptation to the land, to the cultural environment, to the climatic conditions and to the needs of the programme that motivates every architectural proposal. In this manner, the constructive solutions define the way of the aesthetic results. As opposed to the gesture and the spectacle, Ramón Esteve reconciles us with an efficient architecture, not lacking poetry, that uses near materials such as the rodeno stone utilized in his known house Paz y Comedias in Montepicayo. It is an architecture that bases on the popular heritage, as when he inspires in the cubic constructions of Ibiza in his already famous house Na Xemena, with its water sheet that gets lost in the horizon. It was in this house where, as the architect explains, began the activity of designing interiors and furniture: “Here we designed absolutely everything, so that every piece was a part of the same story”. The furniture is born as the development and the complement to his architecture, causing a variety of innovative and Mediterranean collections such as the ones developed for Gandía Blasco, Vondom, Vibia or De Castelli. Because of his capacity to create spaces that are coherent with the environment, he has even developed an imaginative leisure proposal for the exteriors of the NH Hotels, that complements the Ferran Adrià’s filosophy.  However, it is in the area of the particular houses design that Ramón Esteve has achieved his greatest success. His houses are essentialist, with a predominance of stone and wood, of the white and the light, in geometric, never gratuitous games of planes, formulated in order to make the exterior get into the house, but also to help our look to find the pleasure of the landscape. Able to dominate geometry, artist of the space, tectonic constructor and designer from the architecture, to which he gives intern rationality, defined by harmony and contextualisation. This is how we could synthesize Ramón Esteve’s work, his “clean” architecture that approaches him to masters such as José Antonio Coderch or Alejandro de la Sota.