Orfeo Quagliata: glass artist

Orfeo Quagliata doesn’t simply blow glass.

In his hands, glassmaking requires new verbs: fuse, slump, boil, slice.

With these actions, he has invented a trinity of techniques he dubs “Jimiz Brainz,” “Cellz,” and “Sporz,” and which he uses to produce the hundreds of jewelry designs for which his studio in Naucalpan, Mexico City is best known, as well as bowls, glasses, and decorative pieces for the home.

He describes what he does as “the dumb glass technique. You put it in the oven—it’s just like cooking.”

But the effects are not easy to achieve. The studio is full of psychedelic glass plates with bright globules floating inside that look like, in the artist’s words, “boogers and brains.” He describes this “Jimiz Brainz” series as like peering inside rocker Jimi Hendrix’s cranium.

Quagliata achieves the effect by boiling different colors of glass together to “create a world trapped between the two sides of the glass—a lot like how Superman’s dad trapped the bad guys in a sheet of glass in Superman 2.”

He makes his “Cellz” by fusing together sheets of various colors and drilling out thick plugs of glass, which are then melted into big, striated rounds.

Workers gather up all the waste glass and heap them into molds to “slump” them (in the oven) into various forms.

Despite his passion for the medium, Orfeo Quagliata never fell head over heels for glass; the son of famous glass artist Narcissus Quagliata and grandson of Herta Jalkotzy, an award-winning jewelry designer, working with glass was just part of everyday life.

“I was the boy that would shave the lead,” he says, “at least until my mother found out!” Lead lends glass a sparkle, just one of various substances added to glass to change its properties.

His Austrian mother and Italian father met in Humboldt County, California, and Orfeo spent his early years living in classic hippie style at Project 1, an artist commune in San Francisco.

“I didn’t want to live in my father’s shadow,” he says. “But I thought I could give something back to glass. I have a ton of fun with it now.” He even lends a hand on his dad’s installations, like the recently completed 870-meter dome in the Central Metro Station in Taiwan, which took five years of work.

“We’re pretty much joined at the hip, as much as we might complain about it sometimes,” he says.

Orfeo has called Mexico home for nearly a decade. Although all his pieces are produced here, he sells almost everything abroad.

When he told one Mexican woman who was wearing his jewelry that it was made in Mexico, she accused him of piracy. She had bought the piece in New York City, at Henri Bendel on Fifth Avenue.

That attitude is slowly changing, Quagliata says. Mexico is already exporting architects and film directors, and he hopes design will be next.

“Someday Mexico will be a place where people come to buy design, not just craft,” says Quagliata.

To visit the studio in Naucalpan, call (55) 2451 7112 or go to www.phuzedesign.com for directions.