Pedro Adán Sánchez
Cartagena, 1942 – Cartagena, 2017
Painter, set designer, product designer and interior designer
If I think of Pedro Adán, someone very tall, very calm and very affable comes to mind, endowed with a deep voice of those that are not forgotten and, moreover… naked. Because this designer and the writer used to coincide in that natural paradise we have in Cartagena, the naturist campsite El Portús. Thanks to the director for more than forty years, Aurelio Vaquero, a lover of design and a regular at DIP activities, we have been able to have contacts and learn more about Pedrito, as his intimates called him.
For example, that in the mid-80s he shared a flat with the also young Luis Gutiérrez and Francisco Martín, who had been a child singer, like Marisol and Joselito, named Paquito, and who would become one of the most important cultural managers in our country, promoter of initiatives such as “La Mar de Músicas” and member of the Mestizo collective, to name just a couple. I imagine, since I was never there, what state of creative grace it would have been in that apartment in Cartagena at that time. And I get a smile.
In Pedro Adán’s production until that moment there were choreographies, set designs, methacrylate lamps and beautiful unisex jewellery that, many years later, in September 2011, he would exhibit at the Bisel art gallery, under the title “Steel-Methacrylate-Light”, his three favourite materials. A first creative stage that he developed above all in Valencia.
The most festive Cartagenans of a certain age still remember the intervention he made in the Teatro Principal to celebrate Carnival, a spectacular montage with a silk parachute. That was the designer’s first work when he returned to our region, a commission from the City Council of Cartagena, which was followed by another, which he solved with methacrylate panels, for a new city hall building. Near the Molinete, today it belongs to the Polytechnic University. Unfortunately, Pedro Adán’s contribution has not been preserved.
Less ephemeral were his interior design works in cafes, restaurants and other premises in Cartagena, spaces that many of us will have enjoyed without knowing that, if we were comfortable, it was largely thanks to Pedro. This is the case of the pub of the Hotel Cartagonova, a bar on Calle Jabonerías (formerly Sagasta) and a restaurant on Calle del Aire, now closed. And numerous interventions were carried out in homes and private companies, not only in Cartagena, but also in Madrid, Murcia and Almeria, including the IVI centers of the latter two cities.
Other people I consider close to me could tell us more about Pedro’s work: the team of Quarta Mobiliario Contemporáneo and Ramón García, the Valencian gallery owner and patron of Mateo Charris and Gonzalo Sicre in their times of My name’s Lolita Art. I have written it down for later.
But I prefer to contact Alfonso Martínez now, owner of the gallery El Callejón de la Parra and a practicing interior decorator, although, as he tells me, he is more than seventy years old, so he has immediately joined the list of our protagonists of “Memory of Design Region of Murcia. Stage Two”. From him I learned that Pedro Adán Sr. was a settler at La Lonja, a job that did not fit at all with such a creative son.
Classmates from decoration studies, Alfonso and Pedro collaborated on two occasions: before the Valencian stage and, above all, on Pedro’s return to Cartagena, in many of those interior design works and also in the art gallery, which Pedro Adán directed for a couple of years. And thanks to the photographs sent by Lola Olmos, Pedro’s partner at the end of his life, we will be able to admire some of his works, which speak for themselves.
Because with Pedro I talked about time, about life, about his daughter, who lives in Italy and gave him grandchildren, but without a doubt I missed an opportunity, because I never mentioned design. In the little that Google knows about him, I find a simple quote of how he positioned himself on the matter: “Whenever I design, the first thing I think about is functionality. Making it beautiful comes later.”
………
A memory of Teresa Jular, with the collaboration of Aurelio Vaquero, Alfonso Martínez and Lola Olmos.
Video
Jewelry Pieces