The revival of the Phoenix

Country: Spain

Manufactory: Lladro

Date of establishment: 2014

Sculptor: Francisco Polope

Size (cm): 49*37

Limited Series

Porcelain Story

There was nothing like it in my collection either before or after. Never. This happened only with this large and very bright composition. I was looking for it first. Then I found it and bought it. And then ... returned to the seller. And after some time ... I bought it again!

However, let's explain everything in order. The fact is that, constantly following the work of the outstanding Spanish sculptor Francisco Polope, a few years ago I drew attention to his new work called ''The Rebirth of the Phoenix''. Both the spectacular picture and the beautiful title intrigued me so much that, having ordered this work, I began to look forward to its arrival. Moreover, the topic of rebirth from the ashes has long and strongly worried me for personal, so to speak, reasons. As many times as I myself had in my life, having lost, it would seem, everything, to start over, from scratch, from the ashes, not everyone is destined to survive. And every time, rising from the ashes, I reassured myself with a phrase read at the dawn of a foggy youth: it’s not scary to fall, it’s scary not to rise after a fall ...

At home, I opened a large branded box that had arrived from Spain with some incomprehensible excitement. And when I opened it, I was immediately ... disappointed.

"God, what is this?" - I suddenly burst out in the presence of my wife. A large bright red product, replete with many fine details and incomprehensibly conveying the passion and pain of a bird rising from a sizzling flame, made such a depressing impression on me that I immediately closed the box. And I sent it to the attic - out of sight, out of mind ... And then I completely agreed that the purchase would be accepted from me back.

And it just so happened that during the same period, in my free time, so to speak, from work, I was rushing about in a creative search for an emblem for our future museum. And surprisingly, one way or another, it all came down to the idea of using the symbolic image of the phoenix bird in this emblem. Went through hundreds, if not thousands, of possible options. Until suddenly, for myself, I presented a picture of two such birds (you see this picture on the right), which would symbolize our life tests with my Galyunia, which led us as a result to the idea of ??creating beauty that could be shared with people.

And then I again involuntarily remembered the work of Francisco Polope, which I had so hastily abandoned. ''What have I done?'' - I thought. After all, the author wanted to impress the imagination of porcelain connoisseurs not with the beauty of the legendary bird, but with the internal struggle of the heroine of the composition to overcome the impossible - to return to life from sizzling nothingness! ''everything is lost'', that no one will ever be able to get out again from under a pile of insoluble problems. And he did choose! And it is unlikely that at that moment of revival he could look calm and sleek. A desperate struggle for survival at the very moment of the struggle does not paint anyone. Rather, on the contrary, it distorts the face with a grimace of anguish of all physical and moral forces ... And this is how the great clever Francisco Polope portrayed the resurgent phoenix in this work.

Now we have this piece in our collection again. And the emblem, which symbolizes so much to me, also seems to have taken root.