Earth Made
30 Nov 2012 - 07 Jan 2013
EARTH MADE
Guido Gambone - Franco Meneguzzo - Fausto Melotti - Andrea Parini - Nanni Valentini - Luigi Zortea
30 November 2012 - 7 January 2013
The distinction between art and decorative arts has always been at the centre of an open debate inflaming the souls of art lovers.
The word ceramic, considered fragile and of common use, in virtue of this meaning, psychologically contributes to widen the distance from the word Art. Actually, in the light of the developments of contemporary art, this limitation is totally cancelled by the artists' easy use of materials, and among these ceramic is not an exception. So today it is only in form and content, thanks to the presence of an object in a specific market, that we see it and give it artistic peculiarities. Going over this ancestral impasse, there are some historical data we should consider in the passage of reproduction of form in series, in the vision of the designer, and the consequent transformation of the ceramist in producer of unique or multiple works. The previous attempts of production in series, which brought to the creation of Italian Design, between the end of the 19th century until the definitive success during the sixties, had been introduced by some design forerunners and had been resolved in industrial productions of small series, if not limited to few pieces resulting unique.
In the past century, Italy was full of workshops of able craftsmen, now disappeared, who, foreseeing the industrial transformation and heirs of a thousand-year-old skill, started experimenting, with more or less positive results, new forms and techniques. During this research some of them re-interpreted common or ancestral forms arriving to the creation of works which, summarizing the dictates of art itself, did not forget the characteristics of the material used. In other fields instead, the artists continued a research, started in the twenties, arriving to a wider experimentation with ceramic, which had its peak between the mid-fourties and the end of the fifties. The best-known were: Pablo Picasso, Juan Mirò, Lucio Fontana, Leoncillo Leonardi, Fausto Melotti, who experimented with ceramic producing works of the highest levels. Some of these artists availed themselves of able craftsmen who, in their workshops, suggested the use of the most appropriate materials for the creation of works in a reciprocal exchange of information and discussions producing a new vision of the matter.
While Fontana, during the fourties, realized his baroque majolica in Albissola, Leoncillo Leonardi, in Umbria at the Rometti factory and in his studio in Rome, reinterpreted form and colours in the re-reading of his baroque, which shortly thereafter would become from neo-cubist to informal. At the end of the thirties in Nove near Bassano del Grappa, home to well-known ceramics famous in Veneto of '700, Luigi Zortea, being an able and discrete craftsman, was poetically inspired by the forms of that tradition in the creation of imaginative and surreal white majolica flower tufts that would later inspire Giò Ponti. In the same place, Andrea Parini, born in Sicily, produced slightly polychromatic ceramics which, because of his origins, were translated in metaphysical and narrative works. In the discussion of form and space Lucio Fontana, during meetings with his friends, compared his ideas with those of Nanni Valentini and Franco Meneguzzo, who in their research experimented simple forms, with earth brown colours, through a new interpretation of matter, often scratched and punched so to reveal their real nature hidden by poor, but highly refined glazings. These glazings coated the elegant forms and the figures realized by Fausto Melotti who, in cooperation with great architects such as Giò Ponti and Melchiorre Bega, would create environments covered in polychrome majolica, realized in his laboratory. Finally Guido Gambone, a native Campanian who moved to Florence in 1950, during his career will make timeless-shaped majolica, coated with a thick and permeable glazing, experimenting grès mixtures that will give new life to matter so to make him one of the most awarded and internationally recognized ceramists. This choice of names, linked to the objects of our private collection, do not represent an exhaustive and privileged list of those who brought ceramic to be considered as an expression of art, but just some examples of that fertile activity of artistic innovation that took Italy to be internationally considered as a location of high quality productions.
Guido Gambone - Franco Meneguzzo - Fausto Melotti - Andrea Parini - Nanni Valentini - Luigi Zortea
30 November 2012 - 7 January 2013
The distinction between art and decorative arts has always been at the centre of an open debate inflaming the souls of art lovers.
The word ceramic, considered fragile and of common use, in virtue of this meaning, psychologically contributes to widen the distance from the word Art. Actually, in the light of the developments of contemporary art, this limitation is totally cancelled by the artists' easy use of materials, and among these ceramic is not an exception. So today it is only in form and content, thanks to the presence of an object in a specific market, that we see it and give it artistic peculiarities. Going over this ancestral impasse, there are some historical data we should consider in the passage of reproduction of form in series, in the vision of the designer, and the consequent transformation of the ceramist in producer of unique or multiple works. The previous attempts of production in series, which brought to the creation of Italian Design, between the end of the 19th century until the definitive success during the sixties, had been introduced by some design forerunners and had been resolved in industrial productions of small series, if not limited to few pieces resulting unique.
In the past century, Italy was full of workshops of able craftsmen, now disappeared, who, foreseeing the industrial transformation and heirs of a thousand-year-old skill, started experimenting, with more or less positive results, new forms and techniques. During this research some of them re-interpreted common or ancestral forms arriving to the creation of works which, summarizing the dictates of art itself, did not forget the characteristics of the material used. In other fields instead, the artists continued a research, started in the twenties, arriving to a wider experimentation with ceramic, which had its peak between the mid-fourties and the end of the fifties. The best-known were: Pablo Picasso, Juan Mirò, Lucio Fontana, Leoncillo Leonardi, Fausto Melotti, who experimented with ceramic producing works of the highest levels. Some of these artists availed themselves of able craftsmen who, in their workshops, suggested the use of the most appropriate materials for the creation of works in a reciprocal exchange of information and discussions producing a new vision of the matter.
While Fontana, during the fourties, realized his baroque majolica in Albissola, Leoncillo Leonardi, in Umbria at the Rometti factory and in his studio in Rome, reinterpreted form and colours in the re-reading of his baroque, which shortly thereafter would become from neo-cubist to informal. At the end of the thirties in Nove near Bassano del Grappa, home to well-known ceramics famous in Veneto of '700, Luigi Zortea, being an able and discrete craftsman, was poetically inspired by the forms of that tradition in the creation of imaginative and surreal white majolica flower tufts that would later inspire Giò Ponti. In the same place, Andrea Parini, born in Sicily, produced slightly polychromatic ceramics which, because of his origins, were translated in metaphysical and narrative works. In the discussion of form and space Lucio Fontana, during meetings with his friends, compared his ideas with those of Nanni Valentini and Franco Meneguzzo, who in their research experimented simple forms, with earth brown colours, through a new interpretation of matter, often scratched and punched so to reveal their real nature hidden by poor, but highly refined glazings. These glazings coated the elegant forms and the figures realized by Fausto Melotti who, in cooperation with great architects such as Giò Ponti and Melchiorre Bega, would create environments covered in polychrome majolica, realized in his laboratory. Finally Guido Gambone, a native Campanian who moved to Florence in 1950, during his career will make timeless-shaped majolica, coated with a thick and permeable glazing, experimenting grès mixtures that will give new life to matter so to make him one of the most awarded and internationally recognized ceramists. This choice of names, linked to the objects of our private collection, do not represent an exhaustive and privileged list of those who brought ceramic to be considered as an expression of art, but just some examples of that fertile activity of artistic innovation that took Italy to be internationally considered as a location of high quality productions.