I am a sculptor, and not a ceramist. I have never turned a plate or painted a vase: filigrees and shadings I find wearisome.

The excellent delicateness of Copenhagen ceramics bores me. And the same goes for dinner services by Sèvres, biscuit porcelain and majolica.

I abhor the mystics of technique. The prodigious output of Sèvres and Copenhagen pander to the tastes of the high society and collectors. There is a sort of ecstasy over anything fragile and bourgeois in its tastes. I am looking for something else.

During my long stay at the Sèvres workshop, what I was researching and studying was form, the expression of form. Jut as I had done in my own studio, I made figures and metamorphoses that weighed a ton, and painted them in strong colors. In all my models, from first to last, the plastic form has never been dissociated from color. I have always produced polychrome models. I was always coloring plaster, terracotta: color and form as an indissoluble entity, born of the same necessity.

There are illustrious precedents to the polychrome canon: the Egyptians, Greeks, Etruscans, Syrians, everything from cave drawings to Renaissance sculpture. However, let's return to ceramics. I produced my first ceramic piece in Argentina, 1926: it was called the Charleston Dancer and was purchased by the Gallery of Modern Art, Rosario Santa Fé. It was not until 1936 that I started working full on with ceramics at the Mazzotti factory in Albisola where I produced some fifty pieces, featuring algae, butterflies, flowers, crocodiles, lobsters, all in a petrified, shining aquarium.

What attracted me was the material: I could model an underwater backdrop, a statue or a lock of hair and prime a virgin, compact color which the fire would amalgamate. Fire served as a sort of intermediary, perpetuating as it did both form and color.

After the aquarium and the mineral flowers, I started modeling busts, masks, metamorphoses. My women with gold faces made its way around the Italian gallery circuit. The term primordial ceramics was bandied about, though I was calling my work "sculpture". The work was embellished with botanical and marine motifs, but the form followed the course and the oscillations that came from the rhythms that were forming inside of myself in a timeliness that allowed no space for fond contemplation. When I moved from Albisola to the Sèvres factories where I set about creating shells, rocks, octopuses and figures representing strange animals that never really existed, my work met with no praise. Royal enamels bored me. To the very workshops which had furnished the tables of all the King Louis' of France I took a Minotaur on a leash that butted the porcelain baskets and Biscuit allegories. I should not have had to say this: these are things have to be said by others. On another occasion, perhaps, I will be more modest.

Lucio Fontana, My Ceramic, Tempo, 21 September, 1939.