During Reniel Del Rosario’s month-long residency, he says he made “fifteen plates, one hundred flowers, two hundred cigarettes. Like ten eggs. A basket. Twenty-four cups.” For Del Rosario, this is actually a modest number. A ceramicist exploring the notion of overproduction, Del Rosario renders everyday objects into ceramic sculptures, usually numbering in the few hundred to several thousand. “It’s about the overwhelmingness of the products, a critique on mass production and mass consumption,” he says. Rather than slick refinement, Del Rosario is seeking an almost amateurish quality in the work. He makes all the sculptures without the help of assistants—“I can make a hamburger in, like, two minutes”—and sells them for the same price as the consumer goods they represent. 

Del Rosario was born in Iba, a fishing town on the northern west coast of the Philippines, and studied ceramics at UC Berkeley. This was not a lifelong dream. He went to a tech middle school and high school, studied robotics and computer science, and at Berkeley he took a ceramics class because it was the only class with space left. The tactility of ceramics drew him in. “It changed everything,” he says. “I was like, ‘This is what I want to do.’” 

His abundant ceramics are presented in public installations that recreate retail environments. For The American Dream/Renny’s Delicatessen (2018), he made loads of pastries, burgers, and macarons. Rosario also performs as purveyor of these spaces. He acted like a mid-century delicatessen worker for The American Dream, and as a sleazy museum director for another project. At the Fountainhead, he made Florida gift shop merchandise and ad hoc signage for guns and psychic tarot readings. “Those are the kinds of things that I really, really want to get into,” he says of future work., “This kind of dichotomy between the ‘high end’ and ‘low end,’ and how those affect each other in our actual consumer decisions.”