Interview · August 2026
Meet Toni Graton
A gargoyle bursts out of an arch with wings spread in an attack stance. The wings are seductive, in vibrant colors and rich textures, but the whole creature is covered in spikes that fan out and point straight at you. At the tips of the wings, two dark holes lead into the sculpture’s interior. The piece is called “Dionéia,” named after a carnivorous plant.
“It is a work that simultaneously attracts and repels. It invites the viewer’s gaze, only to attack it.”
The artist behind it is Toni Graton from Brazil, one of our resident artists at Salemi Ceramics.
From printmaking to clay
Toni came to ceramics through an elective course in the final year of his Printmaking studies in 2017. Ever since then he took more workshops and never stopped. At the start of the pandemic, he set up his own studio, and with it came the time and freedom to shape the work he makes today: human and hybrid forms in unconventional configurations, or often starting from the vessel form, always in search of unexpected results.
Even though he currently works primarily with ceramics, he also does metal engraving and painting.
Working with colors
Before ceramics, Toni worked almost exclusively in metal engraving, a technique that lives in black and white. He had even resigned himself to the idea that he had no knack for color, but then he discovered glazes.
“I was struck by the colorful, glossy surfaces of the glazes. Color added a new dimension to my work, bringing a feeling of vibration and pulse. I love it when a glaze emerges through the layer covering it, or when it runs. These patterns remind me of images seen under a microscope; they evoke the secret movement of life that exists within things,” shares the artist.
Deities, serpents, and the humans in his work
His favorite piece, “O início” (The Beginning), places a central human figure amid a swirl of forms that spill out and orbit around it. Everything in this piece is in motion, undergoing transformation.
“Perhaps this imposing figure, existing amidst the surrounding chaos, can be viewed as a kind of deity, a would-be creator.”
Despite the human forms that populate his sculptures, Toni avoids identifying his subjects: the body is one element within the tangle of information that makes up each piece.
But there is one exception. In “Oráculo” (Oracle), a serpent sits in a hole, two small human figures before it and a third inside its entrails. The serpent’s head is a self-portrait. It happened by chance: the piece began as a simple anatomical study of his own face, and grew from there.
His inspirations are just as open: movies, religious iconography and mythology, the fluid structures of cartoon characters, the curved and rigid forms of nature, and the small sculptures that fill our daily lives such as toys, knick-knacks, nativity scenes.
For Toni, clay gives his figures something no flat medium can.
“Ceramic sculpture allows the forms and figures that inhabit my personal iconography to exist in the same reality as I do. They possess volume, texture, weight, and temperature; they are fragile and require specific care.”
The Salemi residency
In Salemi, Toni will create ceramic sculptures that live somewhere between toys and domestic devotional images. Both, as he sees it, accompany us quietly through our lives: toys in childhood, devotional images in adulthood, shaping our worldview without ever being treated as art objects.
“In these sculptures, I will aim to capture the lightness and playfulness of the former, alongside the austerity and divine aura of the latter.”