Gradium, 2009: an evening for creativity
I started working as a designer when I was twenty-two, but my path as a designer has always been mixed with art and creativity. During my doctoral studies I worked a great deal on leadership and on how teams are built, and I decided to put it into practice: I started a creative boutique that worked with companies. Little by little we grew, and we applied a method of our own. Many of the people who came through that studio teach today in faculties of Fine Arts or in design schools of the highest level, and I am prouder of that than of anything else.
We won quite a few awards, in Madrid, nationally and in Valencia, and we won big accounts, because we offered something different, somewhere between art, design and communication. People were excited, because nobody else was offering that at the time.
Gradium was born from that excitement: a way of rewarding creativity in communication and design. We designed everything ourselves, from the poster to the trophy, a black figure leaning forward and shouting, cut in acrylic. In 2009 the MuVIM in Valencia let us exhibit: we showed a great deal of the work we had done as a creative agency, we invited other agencies to show theirs, and we gave prizes to people who had made wonderful campaigns. Half of the companies of Valencia came. There was jazz in the square, cheese and roses on the tables, and a long evening at the end of spring of conversations. We had our own communications department, and it showed: we appeared on four or five television channels and in the press. It was a real success.
It was a high point in my career, the kind of recognition that holds you up. It allowed us to keep going for four more years through a crisis that closed around ninety per cent of the agencies in Spain. And then, because it had become impossible to keep working here, my journey abroad began: projects with people in the United States, in England, in Brussels, and finally work for an English multinational.
That is why building bridges, between artists and companies, between our market and others, is part of my own story. Everything I do today began in that small studio, where art, design and communication sat at the same table, and where nothing was ever made alone.
Wherever you are, if a work has caught your eye, or you would like my view on a piece you own or are thinking about, write to me. I will be glad to look at it with you.