'It is true that a good part of Claudi Casanovas’ work has tended towards monumentality, towards a kind of excess that appears to be a mastadontic and imposing exhibitionism. But, what these pieces say doesn’t strike me as demagogic or vociferous. Rather, they are silent, they celebrate what they are with great restraint; at the most they roll around like the body of an animal in the sun. It’s quite a paradox, because the pieces that he fires are often deliberately exaggerated. In one of the emails that he sends me right after the visit to his studio, he is tempted by the grotesque as it was formulated by Victor Hugo, as the contribution of ugliness and the fantastic to the complete perception of its opposite: the sublime. 'I was thinking that my large-format pieces, size XXL, could be grotesque', he writes, 'like the gargoyles of a cathedral'. He shares his chimerical tendency with the Italian artist Giuseppe Penone, so present in Casanovas’ prints for his notion of material as a skin with memory, and about whose work he has also commented on the 'monstrous inflection' that has often consisted of introducing into the forest morbid, incongruous and artificial elements that nature ends up assimilating as its own excrescences. On another occasion, Casanovas expressed a desire to have a 'titanic robot, able to model tons of earth'. And if that weren’t enough, he sometimes subjects his ceramics to terrible strains: sandblasting them, bringing them to the boiling point, dropping them from a great height or exposing them to freezing. 'That’s why I make them', he says, 'because imagination alone will only get you so far'.'
- Eva Vázquez, quoted in (Eva Vázquez and Jordi Puig, Claudi Casanovas Ceramics 1975-2015, Catalonia, 2016)