Emerging from Pedrita Studio’s ongoing exploration of material memory and the Portuguese tile as a visual language, 6 Leonar brings together two forms of reclaimed material. A cropped portrait sourced from an old photograph is reconstructed through ceramic fragments, each tile functioning as a pixel within the larger image. The title itself preserves a trace of the photograph’s original life, borrowing the name Leonar from the brand of photographic paper printed on its reverse.

Characteristic of Pedrita Studio’s practice, collection and recomposition become ways of giving existing materials new narratives. Despite its intimate scale, the work brings together a remarkable diversity of ceramic techniques, from discontinued Portuguese industrial trims to hand-glazed and hand-painted tiles and ceramic decals. As these fragments are selected from the studio’s evolving archive, every work in the edition is different. Moving between photography and ceramic, portraiture and abstraction, repetition and singularity, 6 Leonar gives both image and material a new life while preserving traces of where they came from.