Reinaldo Sanguino at The Future Perfect: Meissen Porcelain Meets 1990s Graffiti

Art & Culture · New York

Reading time: 6 min

Eighteenth-century Meissen porcelain was the most rarefied object a European court could own. Nineties New York graffiti was a crime. Reinaldo Sanguino puts them on the same stool — and at The Future Perfect, collectors cannot get enough of it.

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There is a version of this story that is simply about colour. Reinaldo Sanguino makes porcelain stools and vessels in vivid, splashed, spontaneous hues, they look terrific in an interior, and The Future Perfect sells them. That version is true, and there is a richer one behind it.

The better story is what those splashes actually are, and where they come from. Sanguino developed his technique out of a sustained interest in Meissen porcelain — the eighteenth-century German ware that was Europe’s first true hard-paste porcelain, an aristocratic obsession, and for a period a material more tightly controlled than gold. He then decorates it in the visual language of the early-1990s New York street art he encountered as a young immigrant.

That collision — court porcelain and subway graffiti, the most legitimate object in European decorative arts and the most illegitimate mark in American urban culture — is the entire practice. Everything else follows from it.

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Who is Reinaldo Sanguino?

Born in Caracas in 1973, Sanguino trained at the Escuela de Artes Visuales Cristóbal Rojas, graduating in 1993 with a specialisation in ceramics. He moved to New York the same year, aged twenty, and has been based there ever since — a career now spanning three decades.

The timing matters enormously. Arriving in New York in 1993 meant arriving at the tail end of the city’s great graffiti era, into a visual environment saturated with tags, throw-ups and pieces, at precisely the moment a young ceramicist was working out what his own surfaces should look like. He did not adopt graffiti as a style later, as a market move. He absorbed it as the ambient visual language of the city he had just moved to.

What he brought with him was rigorous classical training. What he found was a city covered in unauthorised paint. The work has been negotiating between those two facts ever since.

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The technique: two traditions, one object

Sanguino treats clay as two things at once: a structural material and a canvas. That dual framing explains why the objects behave the way they do.

The forms are made using classical methods — thrown on the wheel and cast in moulds, often mixing different clay bodies within a single piece. This is disciplined, historically grounded ceramic practice, and the debt to Meissen is structural, not decorative. Hard-paste porcelain is unforgiving; it demands precision at every stage. The forms have to be right before anything can be done to them.

Then the surface. Once the work is dried, Sanguino paints it in a spontaneous, abstract, gestural manner — drips, splashes, sweeps of saturated colour applied fast and without correction. Where Meissen’s decorators worked in the most controlled idiom imaginable, painting flowers and figures with miniaturist exactitude for princes, Sanguino works in the idiom of a writer with a can and limited time.

The result is an object holding two incompatible attitudes to labour in the same body. The form says this took years to learn. The surface says this took ninety seconds. Both are true, and the tension between them is why the pieces do not settle into decoration.

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The stools

It was the stools that made his name, and they remain the pieces collectors chase.

They are a daring proposition: porcelain is the most surprising material imaginable for something you sit on, which is precisely the provocation. A Sanguino stool asks you to place your body weight on a substance historically associated with the fragile, the precious and the display cabinet, and then it asks you to do so on a surface that looks like it was tagged.

They have become, as one assessment puts it, an accessory of the twenty-first-century interior: sought by decorators and architects who need to introduce personality into a room without introducing clutter. A single Sanguino stool does more work in a restrained space than almost anything else at its scale. It is sculpture that happens to be load-bearing.

The wider body of work, vases, vessels, sculptural objects, operates on the same logic. Each is unique, made and painted one at a time.

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The Future Perfect: where the work sits

The Future Perfect is the right gallery for this, and understanding why requires knowing what it is.

Founded by David Alhadeff in 2003, it has become one of the world’s foremost contemporary design galleries, built on a curatorial position that prizes the coalescence of playfulness, craftsmanship and innovation. It operates from Manhattan’s West Village, the Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles, Little Haiti in Miami, and Pacific Heights in San Francisco — and pioneered the residential gallery model with Casa Perfect, which has occupied, among other places, Elvis Presley’s former Beverly Hills house and a New York townhouse fitted with a David Chipperfield staircase.

That model is the point. Showing collectible design in a home rather than a white cube changes how the work is read: not as art to be contemplated at a distance, but as objects to be lived alongside. For a maker whose stools demand to be sat on, that framing does real argumentative work.

Casa Perfect debuted Sanguino’s graffiti-inspired ceramics to a design audience that arrived expecting decoration and left with something rather more complicated.

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Recognition

Sanguino’s work has been shown at:

• Museum of Arts and Design, New York
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
• Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina
• Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis
• Sultan Gallery, as part of the Dean Project, New York

He has also collaborated beyond the design world — including with Dries Van Noten — the kind of crossover that tends to follow makers whose visual signature is legible at a glance.

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Why this matters now

Ceramics has spent the last decade climbing out of the “craft” category and into the collectible-design market, and Sanguino is a useful case for understanding how that happened, and what it has made possible.

The gain is obvious: makers who once showed at craft fairs now show at galleries like The Future Perfect, command serious prices, and enter museum collections. The strongest work in that shift is decoratively ambitious and conceptually ambitious at once, pairing vivid glazes and generous organic forms with ideas that reward sustained attention, and an interiors market that increasingly wants both texture and argument.

Sanguino belongs firmly in that company, and the reason is the Meissen thread. Because he is engaged with porcelain’s history, with what the material meant, who was permitted to own it, and what it signified, the graffiti is far more than a surface effect. It is a comment. Applying an outlaw visual language to the most socially exclusive material in European decorative arts is a proposition about class, legitimacy and who gets to make precious things.

That rigour is what makes the difference. Sanguino makes an argument you can sit on.

It is worth saying that the work is also handsomely commercial, and that its market success is inseparable from how photogenic it is. That is part of the lineage: Meissen was a luxury good too, made to be desired as much as admired. It also means the pieces repay close looking. Spend time with one and the thinking behind the colour comes steadily forward.

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Frequently asked questions

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Final thoughts

Three hundred years ago, Meissen porcelain was a state secret, guarded by a monarch, and owning it announced that you were among the very few permitted to. Thirty years ago, painting your name on a New York wall could get you arrested.

Sanguino puts both on the same object and asks what the difference really is. That is a question with genuine staying power, and it is the reason his work will keep rewarding attention for a long time to come.