Henraux - Marmo 6 (Eng)

A RC H I T E C T U RE D E S I G N A RT

A RC H I T E C T U RE D E S I G N A RT

Editor in chief Paolo Carli Editor Costantino Paolicchi

5

MARMO Annual Magazine Issue no. 6, April 2017

Editorial Paolo Carli

Deputy Editor Aldo Colonetti

Coordinator Manuela Della Ducata

Marble According to Gillo Dorfles Gillo Dorfles

Editorial staff Eleonora Caracciolo di Torchiarolo, Nicola Gnesi

6

Editorial Coordinator Eleonora Caracciolo di Torchiarolo

Texts Michela e Paolo Baldessari, Luca Beatrice, Paolo Carli, Aldo Colonetti, Craig Copeland, Gillo Dorfles, Marva Griffin Wilshire, Nicola Micieli, Costantino Paolicchi, Alessandra Scappini

Translations Arcadia Lingue, Romina Bicicchi, NTL Firenze

Nicola Micieli

Marble and Experimentation in Italian Conceptual Art Salvo, Luciano Fabro, Antonio Trotta: Three Key Artists Luca Beatrice

30

Interviews Mario Botta by Aldo Colonetti, Marco Casamonti by Eleonora Caracciolo di Torchiarolo, Mimmo Paladino by Flavio Arensi, Daniele Guidugli, Kim De Ruysscher and Mat Chivers by Rosi Fontana

Reflections on Sculpture from Marmo 5 to Marmo 6

Photographers Archivio Henraux, Hélène Binet, Germano Borrelli, Enrico Cano, Craig Copeland, Valentina Fogher, Veronica Gaido, Nicola Gnesi, Carola Merello, Pino Musi, Agostino Osio, Lorenzo Palmieri, Alessandro Russotti, Pietro Savorelli, Gregor Spänle, F. Tarabella

Mario Botta Gravity as an Architectonic Force Aldo Colonetti

Drawing Marble Michela e Paolo Baldessari

Registration no 3/2017 - 24/02/2017 of the “Registro stampa Tribunale di Lucca”

50

Cover Nicola Gnesi, all rights reserved “Printed under the auspices of Henraux SpA”

24

Printers Industrie Grafiche Pacini

Marble Magazine: Material Intentions for Sculpture and Design in the 21st Century Craig Copeland

38

Editor Henraux SpA

14

Graphic Silvia Cucurnia, Thetis

Mimmo Paladino From Archaism to Geometric Neoclassicism

Twenty Years of SaloneSatellite Marva Griffin Wilshire

Design and Marble: Being Everywhere Without Forgetting Where We Come From

94

Aldo Colonetti

1517- 2017 The 500th Anniversary of Michelangelo on Mount Altissimo Costantino Paolicchi

Marble, Where Art Meets Technology Alessandra Scappini

113

88

82

Flavio Arensi

72

Eleonora Caracciolo di Torchiarolo

Bulletin Henraux

106

64

Marco Casamonti Marble, Where Design, Art and Architecture Meet

BY PAOLO CARLI PRESIDENT OF HENRAUX SPA AND HENRAUX FOUNDATION

perception, use and culture of such material, sometimes these articles echo each other as they speak in one voice as in the reflections on the concept of “gravitas” or the meaning of the contrast between art and design, but disagree on others.

Of course, pride of place is given to the discourse on contemporary sculpture, an area in which nowadays unexpected opportunities are coming to the fore as a result of new technologies.

Opportunities that can be fairly controversial too, extremely complex yet powerfully challenging for those who, like Henraux, try to combine the uniqueness of art with serial production, industry with culture. Hard is the attempt to overcome such opposition, as Adriano Olivetti did in his time, as Erminio Cidonio did shortly afterwards, and as we try to do now, with our products, our collaborations and our initiatives.

The focus on technical innovation is then followed by more historical insights, critical essays on the works of living and dead sculptors, reflections on projects, including autobiographical ones.

I would like to end this introduction by mentioning the man who wrote for Marmo 1 in 1962 and who is still today honouring us with his attention: Gillo Dorfles. He will be leading in an unequalled story about the past, which as usual unexpectedly paves the way to the future.

A lesson never to be forgotten.

5

Welcome back.

These are the first words that come to my mind in resuming a publishing and cultural project, the Henraux magazine Marmo, that had been left standing for over forty years and that will be republished now, once a year, starting with its sixth issue.

“Welcome back”, because Marmo 6 is reopening the doors of Henraux’s house and will let the world of art, design and architecture peep in again to find out how firm the wills of a company born in 1821 were then, and still are today: a company that looks farther ahead following the perspective that has brought it back to life.

In the Sixties, Henraux’s House, with the visionary man that was Erminio Cidonio, «felt it was its duty to be there, in the world of the figurative culture of our society, where the artistic vibes and the innovations of industrial design blend into the shapes of today’s world».

Artists, architects, designers, art and design critics will gather here to report on what in the dimensions of design and in artistic expressions all over the world stands out for quality, innovation – a beloved subject to Henraux –, and inner contemporariness. With a special focus on materials.

So, Marmo is a communication tool, a space for sharing, a ground for discussion.

It is surprising to see how true that is in this issue of the magazine: called to reflect on the use of marble and the changes that have taken place over the last forty years in the

BY GILLO DORFLES PHOTOS BY NICOLA GNESI

MARBLE ACCORDING TO GILLO DORFLES C

O

N

S

I

D

E

R

A

T

I

O

N

S

6

For me marble has always been first and foremost an experience associated with the Apuan Alps, especially Mount Altissimo where I have often been for walks with friends with the sea visible in the distance.

But marble belongs to my memory for another reason as well: one of the sculptors I have loved most and that I still consider one of the highest expressions of 20th century art is Henry Moore. An artist I had met several times since 1948, even in Italy, when he was looking for his “marble� in the Apuan quarries. Moore is an admirable artisan, a maker with extensive experience in the use of the most assorted materials: his marble carving is perhaps an unprecedented model, mainly thanks to the support he received first by the Tuscan masons, then by the machines of some studios and companies in Carrara, Pietrasanta and Querceta that can perfectly reproduce craftwork.

They make an amazing show that changes with the season, a sort of a big Land Art exhibition, amidst valleys, sheer cliffs, vertical walls, unexpected depths, as they are the result of centuries of human efforts.

Of course, the new technology has enabled man to conduct excavations and surveys that had been impossible in previous times. Still it is the full scenic design we have before us, that brings me to say that “nature and artifice” may sometimes be at loggerheads though, without man’s will to go beyond the surface of an immaculate nature, this unique material, along with this landscape that seems to come to us from a very distant place, would have never been discovered.

There is another aspect to marble: no one can deny that every square millimetre is one of a kind, unique, always different.

You may take a picture of a slab and try to reproduce a similar texture, but it will never look like the real thing. So, in the age of infinite reproducibility, we are faced with a sort of unicum that the earth gives us, every day. This leads us to discover that creativity does not belong to man alone, but it is in some natural materials as well, marble in this case.

Another distinctive feature of marble, that I think no other material can claim, is its “rarity”. It is bound to finish, though in a very distant future. This means it must be made the most of, in art, in architecture and in design.

9

But marble is also an irreplaceable material in contemporary architecture, especially when vertical facades need not just glass but also a physical language, able to voice the trends of the great classic tradition as well as those of a contemporariness that wants to express a specific “monumentality” next to the occasionally ephemeral transience that is typical of the state of the art, in the modern city. Another great friend of mine, whom I consider one of the most distinctive 20th century Italian architects, Angelo Mangiarotti, trusted marble to fulfil his need to experiment with special forms, aware of the machines’ outstanding ability to translate his seamless, accomplished strokes into sculptures. In this respect, I remember the sculpture placed in front of Triennale di Milano exhibit, the design items that won the Compasso d’Oro, and the building features of his architectures.

But there is more. There’s something unique about Apuan marble: nature is turned into a number of “man-made” sculptures, because man has dug them into the mountains, visible from a distance, especially when you drive on the motorway from Sarzana to Viareggio.

Emilio Isgrò, Il seme dell’Altissimo, 2015, Bianco Altissimo marble, Milan Expo

10

With marble the creative process sets no restrictions whatsoever: any design is possible, no two colour combinations are alike since colours come and go, blurring and veins build unpredictable shapes. I never got tired of looking, and have always being surprised, at the endless variety of stone shapes.

Another distinctive feature of marble, that I think no other material can claim, is its “rarity”. It is bound to finish, though in a very distant future. This means it must be made the most of, in art, in architecture and in design. The geographical area we are speaking of has all these qualities, since it is an unexampled chain, the only one in the world, that meets, along all its steps from the quarries to processing, to industrial and manual processing all the requirements of design and its science.

That’s why the Apuan Alps belong to an exemplary heritage that must be entirely protected throughout the process, from quarrying to global marketing.

The Apuan Alps are part of the “Made

in Italy”, a landscape that seems to be naturally speaking an aesthetic language, as it can be traced in the surrounding villages and towns, waiting for nothing else but man’s hand to do its job.

That’s why it is not by chance that the only marble art featuring at Milan’s Expo is the sculpture by Emilio Isgrò, Il seme dell’Altissimo, from a drawing of an orange seed, turned in this case into a big sculpture (700 cm high) in Bianco Altissimo marble, made by Henraux. It was both the outstanding quality of execution by men and machines, and if I may say the “creative” quality too, that set it in its right place and context, with a completely unusual perception and perspective.

Marble is all this, it can exceed the designer’s expectations and give back to visitors and Art History works that would have been partly left in the artist’s mind: idea and action, design and execution are one, when you deal with a material such as this.

View of Mount Altissimo with the Cervaiole quarry

BY NICOLA MICIELI

REFLECTIONS ON SCULPTURE

FROM MARMO 5 TO MARMO 6

Henry Moore, model for Spindle piece, 1968-1969, Querceta. Henraux Collection Photo Veronica Gaido

R

I

T

I

C

E

S

S

A

Y

Now that Marmo is going to reopen, it seemed appropriate to continue the main outline of Marchiori’s considerations on 20th-century sculpture from 1945 to 1970.

15 | Art

C

16 | Art

Marmo, the international art and architecture magazine published by Henraux closed down in November 1971 after issuing number 5, a sixsection monograph: Venticinque anni di scultura nel mondo, edited by Pier Carlo Santini. Giuseppe Marchiori wrote everything in it, two new general introductory essays (Una conversazione sulla scultura moderna and La scultura italiana moderna), writings reappearing as Pagine di Diario from 1948 to 1970, and ten insights on Consagra, Serrano, Lardera, Pevsner, Lipsi, Gilioli, Kemeny, Ipoustéguy, Jacobsen and Etienne Martin, Mirko.

Now that Marmo is going to reopen, it seemed appropriate to continue the main outline of Marchiori’s considerations on 20th century sculpture from 1945 to 1970. The opening conversation, by retrospectively stepping beyond its deliberate time limits, is a sleek yet accurate excursus of the origins and evolutionary trajectory of modern sculpture. Since Impressionism and its “post” ramifications. Those wornout academic models, in their plastic workings, began to be cast aside by painters (Renoir, Degas, Gauguin, Matisse), before Rodin and above all Medardo Rosso, sculptors who were certainly aware of the Impressionist principles. With the plastic qualities of their paintings so sensitive to the impact of light and the plastic form coming to life in the space it is permeated by, those painters relied on phenomenal naturalness, perceptive relativism and to the subjectivity of visual feedback for their sculptures.

The accidentalness of life breaks into sculpture. At last, the plastic body no longer takes up the space/environment but lives in it, it is affected by it as material, form and figure, and in turn it “moulds” it with its own morphology. Sculpture was starting to claim an identity of its own, on material, formal and structural values that would eventually lead from Rosso’s epithelial Sensibilism to Boccioni’s “unique forms of continuity in space”, and beyond. Through to Pevsner’s Rayonist Constructivism and the kinetic forms of his brother Gabo, whose structures feel like

pure planes of light (Marchiori). Calder’s “mobiles”, sculptures dematerialised by reducing their mass into morphemes of blades connected by straight joints and hanging like sistra, enlivened by a breath of wind; Melotti’s spindly, musical and equally weightless frameworks; the aerial evolution of the light-generating neon tube of a Spatialist Fontana, would follow in their footsteps. Such experience also added to the range of heteronomous materials – man-made products, neon tubes, industrial items –, welcomed and legitimised in the sculpture studio. I remember that Duchamp’s first readymade dates from 1913. But with Fontana we are in the midst of the century already, and research in sculpture has gone a long way. It was 1946 when in his Manifiesto blanco, looking back at the achievements of particle physics, Fontana stated that, in art, the dimension of space/time foreshadowed by Boccioni was inescapable by then. In his “cuts”, Fontana also opens such dimension on the surface of the canvas, the traditional painting medium, if his monochromes are still to be regarded as paintings.

Spatialism becomes a springboard to jump into boundless space through the diaphragm of the canvas. After all, it is on October 4th 1957 that the Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, would be launched.

So, with the Impressionists, the original “crisis point and rebirth” (Marchiori) of sculpture, still strictly anthropomorphic, was starting to wriggle out of classic form.

The range of action of drawing, formerly the only orchestrator, was replaced by other shaping factors. In the meantime, the matter, in its different states, and industrial manufacturing and salvaged materials. Then, the mechanical structure and the linear one, which challenge statics by stretching out into space, like the cyclopean Constructivist winding tower (400 metres) designed in 1919 by Tatlin for the Communist International and never built, or Mastroianni’s massive Cubo-Futurist Monumento alla Resistenza (Cuneo, 1969) where virtual motion radiates out of field-line-generating nuclei. Lastly, the very same space that turns a “container” of sculpture into an

first-time Cubists Braque and Picasso show objects disassembled into overturned, interpenetrated planes.

Boccioni disassembles the plastic form by showing its transformation and life in space/time as in a chronogram.

So, in a way, we owe the etymons of the languages of modern sculpture to these painters-turned-sculptors. A language that could not have been born, after all, without the influence of a sculptor like Brancusi, a totemic artist, a priest of the primitive religion of nature, which welcomed sculpture into the ground of the primeval forms inspired by archaic anthropological eras, figures and loci where hell and heaven meet. Brancusi too focussed on the synthesis and linear decomposition of plane and solid shapes, as well as in the modulation of those sinuously wound in space, themselves abstracted back to a primeval bio-morph of the creatures.

The backbones of modern sculpture were already there, in the span of time from the Impressionists to Brancusi and Duchamp, and they would soon be put in practice by more openminded sculptors. Their multiform physiognomy running until the Seventies on the fronts of research and the main style trends that can be argued from Marchiori’s pages. Fronts and trends that kept unravelling for decades, passing through the new century and the new millennium, in updated versions. While a wide area of conceptual and trans-lingual artistic practices which I would call “encroaching”, experiences imbued with contaminations and semantic swerves between different forms of expression and media, materials and techniques, genres and languages, was opening up. Because of such diverse and synergic working methods and new codes, then the centuries-old statute and the very definition of sculpture, as a physical entity and a plastic, volumetric, structural form, variously developed in the third dimension and more or less permanently placed in space, have changed, in that they have taken on other, more elusive meanings.

17 | Art

active opponent to its trends and paces, bumps and corrosions, helping shape the full and void spaces, the profile of the planes and the morphology of their concave and convex rhythms.

For a few examples, see Moore’s otherwise geological “reclining figures” and “animal forms”; the purity of Arp’s rhythms that recall natural forms, or Mirò’s Solar Bird (1968), which Marchiori chose for the cover of Marmo 5; Alberto Viani’s bent surfaces, an extreme biomorphic abstraction that seems to be disclosed by a soft flow of light. We could go on with Archypenko’s developments between Cubism and Constructivism; Noguchi’s plastic conflations that echo symbolic forms and mythical figures of other civilisations; Lardera’s Slanci and Apparizioni, flame-cut and assembled planar sculptures of profiled sheet metal, and Consagra’s frontal sculptures, their informal plastically breaking out of the tears as if surfacing from deep down.

Speaking of informal, I would like to point out that, in the intricate phenomenology of modern sculpture, Burri’s torn bags and burnt plastics, with the primeval, not to say telluric, values of the matter, look like places devastated by an earthquake, where painting and sculpture meet.

Crossbreeding is another distinctive feature of 20th-century sculpture. From Italy to America, this time with a Neo-Dada-inspired Pop twist, other connections between painting and sculpture include Rauschenberg’s adding non-painting materials to his paintings or, for different reasons, the giant size of the objects that Oldenburg turns into “monuments” to nondescript routine by painting them with full traffic-light colours that would not look out of place on a street poster.

In a nutshell, sculpture goes different ways in the 20th century, until and after the 1970s ratified by Marchiori, all of them implanted with pioneering experiments, largely due to painters who had also worked as sculptors.

Modigliani combines the intuitive language of tribal masks, so important for the birth of Cubism, with Egyptian, Greek Archaic and Tuscan Medieval memories. On the stage of sculpture,

18 | Art

Hans Arp, Femme-paysage, about 1966, Querceta.

Henraux Collection Photo Veronica Gaido

19 | Art

Joan Mirò, Oiseau Solaire made at Henraux studio in 1968 Henraux Collection Photo Veronica Gaido

On the large scale of monumental installations, no longer the embodiment of rhetorical symbols but pure and free creative sculptures, marble stands its ground quite well across the world, with no appreciable competitors.

20 | Art

Mikayel Ohanjanyan, Materialità dell’invisibile, Winner of the Henraux Foundation Award, second edition, summer 2014 Henraux Collection Photo Nicola Gnesi

Of course, sculpture as such was still being made, using centuries-old traditional materials and modern ones borrowed from and originally intended for all sorts of purposes. Sculptors crafted their works with the help of machines or using machines from start to finish, machines that nowadays, with robotics and 3D printing, can perform to levels that would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago.

But it is the mutagenic nature of sculpture that would generate a sort of “transitional” works and operations, a combination of multiple artistic domains, expressive tools, technical and behavioural working methods, in static or dynamic, human or mechanic, real or virtual circumstances, yet impacting the third dimension, developing in space, quite often carried by the artist’s body. Between the Seventies and the Nineties, Ontani made his Tableaux vivants by staging motionless, silent actors in costume. Between the late Eighties and the early Nineties, Orlan, the “body artist”, chose her own body, mainly her head, as a material to be moulded and shaped through surgery and prostheses. Originally a tribal custom of aesthetic manipulation and camouflaging, that on-going alteration of the body marked a turning point in metropolitan anthropology that could be aptly called ‘mutant sculpture’.

Advanced forms and figures of intersection

and crossbreeding, the ones that defined sculpture in the last decades of the 20th century. They had already been foreshadowed by the spirit, the attitudes and even the practices of avant-garde artists through the ages. Their embryos and first offspring can be glimpsed and recognised, scattered at the front of research and along the main trends suggested by Marchiori’s writings. And let’s quickly look at those fronts, in the continuity/discontinuity of the main far-ranging trends and the new working methods they bumped into along the way.

First and foremost, the organic, bioanthropomorphic trend prompted by Brancusi’s conflations, their somewhat turgid purity stemming from the crucial principle that makes form grow in space, from Arp to Mirò, Moore, Viani, Hepworth. Anthropomorphism recalls the front of expressionist-inspired figurative sculpture focussed on man and his physicality as the carrier and witness of the human condition, from Giacometti to Richier, Marini, Manzù, Ipoustéguy, Perez. The body as “matter” and plastic shape, a living sculpture that changes and acts in space/time, becomes a vehicle for the artistic process, in the experiences we defined as ‘inter-linguistic transition’, a subspecies of Body Art, Action Art, Conceptual Art, as in the performances of Pane and Abramovic and Beuys, whose sculptures are materials and objects

Daniele Guidugli, Moby Dick (vertebra) Detail, winner of the Henraux Foundation Award, third edition, summer 2016 Henraux Collection Photo Nicola Gnesi

his fingerprints or as objects/containers of his own breath or faeces. Further methods of technical work or linguistic and expressive concepts of matter, including the living matter, and object would be deployed, and brought back to worldwide acclaim, by those Italian sculptors who, in the late Sixties, Celant assigned to Arte Povera. Fabro, Kounellis, Merz, Pascali, Pistoletto and others, “poveristi” because they used a wide array of poor materials salvaged from human “trades” or natural ones, often producing installations that expanded the “sculptural” form in the landscape. A sort of Arte Povera on a large environmental scale is Land Art, practised since the Seventies by Christo, De Maria, Heizer, Penone, Smithson, who by marking the land with personal action, by invading the landscape and altering even monumental aspects of the urban landscape with temporary macro-structures, brought life and art together and hinted at an enjoyment and understanding of the environment that was no longer detrimentally anthropic.

Lastly, on the global scene of the art system of the last few years, installations remain the most common form of sculpture and the one that best fulfils the interests of the public, whose appetite for challenging, sensational operations is whetted by skilfully-developed marketing policies. Artists such as Koons, with the showiness of his pneumatic-looking sculptures of animals in mirror-polished stainless steel, Hirst, with his museumlike display cases of zoological anatomy in formaldehyde that attract by tickling the necrophile that is in all of us; Cattelan, with his installations of animals and popes and dictators, entr’acte jokes with an element of surprise, with the macabre, the catastrophist and the surreal all thrown in, put on shows that the media sensation of the ‘before’ and ‘after’ revers as “epochmaking” events.

The great array of unusual materials and languages that has been used in sculpture in the last few decades would seem to point, at the very least, to a fall of figurative or abstract sculpture in

traditional marble and bronze, which in the continuity/discontinuity of the 20th century are definitely the most common and durable materials, and it’s no coincidence that they for years they have found an international concentration of work centres in the marble studios and in the foundries of the Apuan Alps and the Versilia region. In fact, if we look at the extent of the works and the array of artists who did and do work there, we find that the ancient materials did and do keep up quite well with modern and contemporary sculpture. On the large scale of monumental installations, no longer the embodiment of rhetorical symbols but pure and free creative sculptures, marble stands its ground quite well across the world, with no appreciable competitors. I can only mention a few artists, some of whom I have already named, as they come to my mind, and I would need a whole page to list them all. Just think of Poncet, Moore, Adam, Lipsi, Mitoraj, Nivola, Mirò, Yasuda, Finotti, Ogata, Atchugarry, Paladino, Bourgeois, Gilioli, Cardenas, Penalba, Andrea and Pietro Cascella, Sha, Eun Sun, Capotondi, Dereida, Cragg, Theimer, Vangi, Consagra, Ipoustéguy, Noguchi, Botero, Tarabella, Bill, LeWitt, Morris… and I’ll stop here and I’ll just point out that a lot of sculptors who work with unusual materials did go and see marble properly, from Arman to César, Cattelan, Pistoletto, Parmiggiani...

The viability of marble is then also proven by Fondazione Henraux, which is now reopening the magazine Marmo, with a collection that includes works by the biggest names of art, such as Moore, Mirò, Poncet, Arp, Adam, Noguchi, Ruzic, Mormorelli, Stahly, Gilioli, Vantongerloo, etc. Works by young talents destined for big things have been added in the last few years, such as Fabio Viale, Mikayel Ohanjanyan, Daniele Guidugli. And more will be added in the future: those of the winners of the Henraux International Sculpture Award, dedicated to the late Erminio Cidonio, a biennial award for young artists under the age of 45.

23 | Art

manipulated, assembled and arranged as they act them out.

As opposed to the expressionist heaviness of the body as witness to the human condition and the self-referential purpose of body art as a living sculpture, yet full of anthropological meanings and implications, I would now place the mind-focussed formal trend that Filiberto Menna called analytical, built on a Constructivist framework related to space/ time, or the abstract-concrete one based on geometrical order, from Tatlin, Gabo, Pevsner to Bauhaus experimentation, to Moholy Nagi, Sol LeWitt, Bill, Arnaldo and Giò Pomodoro. This is the trend that seems to encompass the sketchy geometrical forms and solid figures of Minimalism, where sculpture and design meet, from LeWitt’s cubes to Flavin’s neon tubes, to Serra’s mighty and weighty metal installations, also subspecies of gigantic primary structures fitted in the landscape as barriers and as lookouts.

A composite front that includes movements and experiments that have been updated since the Fifties is the one about the matter, the materials and the objects that the physical statute of sculpture consists in, since they are also semantically active components of language. First and foremost, the poetics of the matter of the Informal Artists, from Burri to Dubuffet, Fautrier, Fontana, Leoncillo.

Then, the American Neo-Dada artists of the late Fifties, Johns and Rauschenberg bringing Duchamp’s ready-mades back to painting, or better, to painting/sculpture.

In a Pop Art version, Oldenburg would translate such objects into huge sculptures painted in street-poster colours; while the sculptors of the Nouveau Réalisme founded by Restany would use a whole repertoire of used objects that they salvaged, manipulated, transposed into other materials or simply labelled as art: César would press them in baling press machines, Arman would hoard them, either whole or cut up, Spoerri would arrange them on a sculptural trompe l’oeil top, Manzoni would conceptualise them by putting his mark on them wither with

BY LUCA BEATRICE

MARBLE AND EXPERIMENTATION IN ITALIAN CONCEPTUAL ART Salvo, Luciano Fabro, Antonio Trotta: Three Key Artists C

R

I

T

I

C

24 | Art

The belief that, when experimenting with sculpture, using warm materials that are deeply connected with tradition might hinder a more contemporary approach, especially to conceptual art, is the norm.

Despite its outstanding magniloquence, marble, the epitome of a beauty that inevitably aspires to neoclassicism and to monumentality, has experienced the same gene mutation that other maybe less noble materials have had to go through to gain acceptance by the so-called contemporariness.

Something should be said first, though.

That unreasonably mistrusting attitude towards history tends to change as the postmodern era draws closer: when the past, at last, becomes an archive of memory to be reckoned with, when one can choose and use what one needs to update the styles and languages. Painting gets there a bit earlier maybe, but there’s no doubt that by

E

S

S

A

Y

the late Seventies the ideological paradigm of an art (and a culture) built upon an evolutionist effect is overturned. That does not necessarily means having a nostalgic attitude to the past: it is a new realisation, instead. We are no longer fighting with the past, and even the comeback of handiwork can at last be more peacefully deployed.

The exhibition “La ripetizione differente” (“The different repetition”) curated by Renato Barilli at Studio Marconi in Milan (1974), was the paradigmatic harbinger of such change. In comparing the experiences of Pop to Arte Povera, of figurative painting to a quotation of classicism, the Bologna-born critic pointed his finger at the need to take a new turn. One of the guest artists, Salvo, definitely went for painting, which he took up in 1973 and never left ever again until the day of his death, in September 2015.

Even earlier, in 1970, Salvo made a marble

Luca Beatrice Photo Nicola Gnesi

sculpture, Lapidi, engraved with enigmatic and aptly lapidary words or sentences, such as “Idiot”, “Breathing the father”, “I’m the best”. Or a list of forty names, including those of painters, philosophers, poets, writers, with Aristotle at the top and, cheekily, his own name at the bottom.

Though yielded by Arte Povera, which Salvo skirted but never joined, his Lapidi «show, in their monumental, archaising features, a distinctive character that paved the way to his future experimentation». A short series that went on till 1972, with a wide range of inscriptions, from the Assyrian The Lament of Ashurbanipal to Aesop’s The Tortoise and The Eagle.

This is the background of Salvo the archivist, the mnemonic, the cataloguer, who would rather tabulate than think. With him, the conceptual art inspired by Joseph Kosuth blends into the Mediterranean monumentality of marble.

Antonio Trotta, Altri tempi, 2012 White marble: Spiegato, cm 100x70 Piegato, ø 50 cm Courtesy Flora Bigai Arte Contemporanea, Pietrasanta.

Henraux Collection

Bottom, Luciano Fabro, Crono, 1991, Foundation Beyeler, Riehen-Basel Photo Agostino Osio

Luciano Fabro is one of the few Arte Povera artists who persistently explored classicism. He was born in Turin in 1936 and passed away in Milan in 2007. Fabro was the only group member who chose to live and work in Lombardy, and definitely called himself a sculptor, which was a taboo word at the time, as it was so deeply imbued with newness at all costs. Coeval with Salvo were his first experiences with marble: Spirato, 1973, is the first sculpture he made with our material. “The

sculptor – he used to say – works out the ratio of image to sculpture, he must be able to see in the iron, even if unawarely, that it has been wrought, and in the castiron he must feel that it has been cast, and in marble he must feel that the figure is in it, wrought in it”.

In marble sculpture, which he occasionally ventured upon throughout his lifetime, Fabro claimed that, because of “the rampant unsociability of the collapse of conceptual art”, one could just whisper

27 | Art

Top, Luciano Fabro, Nido, 1994, two trunks of a Doric column, Ø 90 cm

Top, Salvo, 40 nomi, 1971, marble

Right, Salvo, Io sono il migliore, 1970, marble

28 | Art

and go back to “pure thought”. Even just a wonderful, big sliver of marble was enough for him to grasp the essence.

In 1982, at PAC, also in Milan, Flaminio Gualdoni curated an important exhibition, “La sovrana inattualità” (“Sovereign Obsolescence”), a reflection on plastic research in the Seventies. Sculpture was expressly unmentioned, as influenced

by Martini’s dogma of “sculpture as an extinct language”.

Why obsolete, then? “It is actually a chosen obsolescence, the sought and accepted risk of doing art as an aim in itself, the will to contradict with facts (without, then, creating any new ideological or theoretical alternative) that false neediness that cages it up from outside. It is not, after all, an entirely new attitude, the outcome of a recent reflection or a maybe contingent response: it is, instead, the recent collapse of artistic research and the co-militant criticism that made the current factors and inspirations take shape out of what are usually considered to be, at least, the beginnings of modern art”. Quite the opposite of an Indian reservation, then, according to Gualdoni, sculpture is throbbing with energy.

The exhibition included works by Antonio

Though yielded by Arte Povera, which Salvo skirted but never joined, his Lapidi «show, in their monumental, archaising features, a distinctive character that paved the way to his future experimentation».

Trotta, who, a few years later, in 1990, set up a big solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale. Born in 1937 in Stio in Cilento, “an Italian from Argentine”, brought up on Jorge Luis Borges and Omar Sivori, Trotta has been living for decades in Pietrasanta where he has further developed his laically fideistic love for sculpture. It was there that I first met him in the early Nineties as I was preparing a show on Disegni di scultura, and it was there that I also listened to his ideas for the catalogue of his solo exhibition at Enrico Astuni, in an interview that had no end and seemingly no thread running through it. A man that was as difficult, unconventional, troublesome and unruly as he was talented, Trotta has worked at a deceitfully archaic idea of plastics, imbued with sound literary and philosophical roots, showing that even an image cam strengthen the bond with the contemporary. His love for marble, classically anchored to “making”, did not certainly restrain him from developing a theoretical thinking that at least to us is as noble as a unicum.

Artifex is one of the sculptures that best embodies his bent for playing with enigmas. Beyond time, present and past.

And on the run from history.

BY ALDO COLONETTI

MARIO BOTTA

GRAVITY AS AN ARCHITECTONIC FORCE I

N

T

E

R

V

I

E

W

30 | Architecture

Mario Botta’s architecture has always been the most straightforward offspring of the relationship between man and his surroundings. The materials we build our ‘homes’ with tell that we come from afar: one of such materials, marble, is one of the oldest and, most importantly, it knows how to interact with the contemporary culture of design without forgetting where it comes from and its outstanding symbolic repertoire.

Mario Botta Photo Nicola Gnesi

Marble is the quintessential building material.

Stone is that part of the mountain that is dug out so it can be tampered with by man, and as a result of such tampering it turns into architecture.

Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Mount Tamaro Photo Enrico Cano

32 | Architecture

Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Mount Tamaro Sketch by Mario Botta

Detail of the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Mount Tamaro Photo Enrico Cano

«Marble is the quintessential building material. Stone is that part of the mountain that is dug out so it can be tampered with by man, and as a result of such tampering it turns into architecture. Louis Kahn speaks of that magic moment when he asks the mountain what it wants to be and it answers: “I would be happy if you could turn me into stone ashlars to give out man’s soul”.

In its collective impersonations, marble is a way to resist the globalisation market. Our generation believed in the values of globalisation, which despite its many positive sides, treats everything as a commodity. This big market has incorporated a number of ersatz products that look as if they are good quality but eventually turn out to be inferior. So, using marble is a way to resist the corruptions carried along by globalisation.

As an architect, I am interested in marble because it works “by gravity”, which

is part of the force of architecture. The ultimate role of architecture is to carry a load to the ground, and all these new ersatz materials aspire to be stone but they are not. Moreover, we must be careful that we do not lose our Mediterranean culture that since the time of Magna Graecia has exploited such force, which only this extraordinary material can give».

Marble also carries memories that are extremely fascinating yet contradictory ...

«As a stone, marble carries the memory of human work. Stone takes on a new beauty through man’s work. From this perspective, it is doubly interesting for an architect. Firstly, because – as I said – it carries the culture of gravity, and secondly because it carries the memory of man. In addition, marble has the advantage that it is a lasting material. Everything ends, even the Egyptian pyramids will disappear one day, but marble, compared with man’s average lifetime, lives far longer, and it lives far longer even than the cultures that have used it over the centuries to spread their values through the churches, the monuments, etc.».

33 | Architecture

Mario, you use lots of different materials in your work and you have always had a view of architecture as an “expression of gravity”. I think marble is very important in this respect...

So, architecture and marble are carriers of cultures...

«Architecture is the formal expression of history and every architectural expression speaks of the history of its time. To face the contradictions of the present, we need to feel that we came from the past, and marble plays an extremely important role in this process».

But can marble embody contemporariness?

«Not completely. If contemporariness praises the short-lived, it will elicit no response from marble. But if instead it looks for endurance and for evidence of what man is doing now for the future

Church of San Giovanni Battista, Mogno Sketches by Mario Botta

34 | Architecture

The interior of the Church of San Giovanni Battista, Mogno Photo Pino Musi

generations, then marble becomes extremely relevant. Every week, the architects’ tables are swamped with ideas for new materials such as plastics or substitutes that can never compete with marble. Another interesting point is the search for lightness, which is an oxymoron in architecture. Architecture is as strong as it is heavy. The contradiction lies in the postmodern misunderstanding that come from embracing Calvino’s literary assumption of the importance of lightness in architecture. Looking for lightness in architecture makes no sense. Don’t forget that than the purpose of architecture is to carry loads to the ground rather than decoration».

Fiore di Pietra, Mount Generoso Sketch by Mario Botta

Having lots of materials means having a very highly selective culture...

36 | Architecture

«Materials are often improperly selected, and so is marble. This happens when you reduce this material to its appearance: then, it totally degenerates. A few days ago, for instance, some people came to me to make marble watches and I explained to them that they were wrong, because marble is not the right material to be used to produce watches. Even if this example shows how the technology of marble is almost surgical nowadays».

Do you use marble in your architectures?

«Yes, when I can. Using marble means looking for beauty, and it is frustrating for an architect to have to use a replacement because of budget restrictions. I think the culture of modernity cannot rival marble. I have made museums and churches in which marble plays a key role. It will always be the prince of all building materials».

Mario Botta Photo Nicola Gnesi

Michela and Paolo Baldessari Photo Nicola Gnesi

BY MICHELA AND PAOLO BALDESSARI

DRAWING MARBLE E

S

I

G

N

39 | Design

D

40 | Design

When we had the chance to work with marble, we felt excited but we also felt the burden of having to reckon with such a precious material. When you approach marble, you actually need to be aware that natural resources must be “wisely” used.

While on one side quarrying can change a region, slice up the landscape, on the other side the industrial or crafted product you get out of marble, must be able to make up for the “mark” left by man.

Working marble requires excellence in the finished product that must convey beauty, harmony and thus be a testament to the new “forms” of contemporariness.

So, new items, new products, either mass produced or in small runs, come to the fore and embody the “seal” of a place, of its traditions, history and handicrafts.

In addition, this responsibility must also go hand in hand with a lay attitude that enables creativity to grasp the figurative potential of the quarries as “new architectural spaces”. That unearths new

shapes, new details, unusual colours, chiaroscuros and contrasts that enhance a new beauty, celebrating a new, profitable, relationship with the other changeable landscape features, whether they are skies, woods, cone-like shapes or meadows.

Our experience with marble put us in the centre of a few architectural, interior décor and design projects, the latter being definitely the most exacting ones.

Actually, with marble, design walks on a very thin line, where art and technology, utopia and crafts meet. Since immemorial times, architecture, interior décor and design have had top reckon with marble, creating some astonishing pieces. How could we forget or neglect the masterly feats of the many architects and designers most of them Italian who tried their hands at large and small scales, with similar methods, wringing out that shape that was already there, in the marble?

The perfect beauty of the blocks, the slabs, their colours, their lovely hues, the

Working marble requires excellence in the finished product that must convey beauty, harmony and thus be a testament to the new “forms� of contemporariness.

Filo table (limited edition, Salone del Mobile 2015), extra-light glass top, assembled base made with three pieces of Versailles marble Photo Nicola Gnesi

Filo table, two heights, extralight glass top, assembled base made with two pieces of Versilys marble Photo Germano Borrelli

Tray centrepiece, Statuarietto marble and untreated cedar wood Photo Germano Borrelli

44 | Design

grids of their veins – no two exactly alike – are the plastic expression of “finished” architectures. They are beautiful in themselves and are the target of respect for “perfection” – and therefore the will “to leave everything untouched” – as well as an unrelenting longing for cutting, engraving, sawing, digging to understand and release the soul of the stone and of the person who’s working with it. Marble is an ancient material, of course it is, but it is undoubtedly a very contemporary one too, because men and designers have given it pride of place, in every age. Designing with

marble means removing the general perception that associates it with statuary sculpture and a feeling of gravitas. It is only when you change your perspective that this material can be associated with the concept of lightness, something that goes beyond the cliché. To do this, it is essential that you trigger that cooperative short-circuit of the eye, the hand and the mind, moving within the boundary that the material draws itself and that turns into an outstandingly wide scope for design, in its pursuit of new expressive potentials and myriad potential forms, in its “encroachments” in its rejection of any

Tray centrepiece with perpetual calendar in Pietra di Stazzema Photo Germano Borrelli

45 | Design

Actually, with marble, design walks on a very thin line, where art and technology, utopia and crafts meet.

Since immemorial times, architecture, interior dĂŠcor and design have had top reckon with marble, creating some astonishing pieces.

Filotto, vase in Statuario Altissimo Photo Nicola Gnesi

46 | Design

Clever is a designer who respects the material without distorting its essence, so as not to break the balance between nature and the use of nature.

passive acceptance of what the material can traditionally express.

Materials belong to nature and to its technological personifications. Objects are, instead, the embodiment and the layering of tastes and aesthetic dimensions. Clever is a designer who respects the material without distorting its essence, so as not to break the balance between nature and the use of nature.

So, we set off on our journey in design with our usual hand-made approach, first making plain sketches then drawings, cardboard models, and eventually landing in the world of the all-important “craftsman’s making skills�, and then going back to our drawings and

correcting them accordingly. This process sparks off that magical loop that is the place of disciplinary exercise, which breeds the expressive potentials and the new combinations that aptly portray a new emotional, aesthetic and functional factor.

The challenge that lies in giving a shape, a purpose and different proportions to these pieces, to the tables, coffee tables, accessories that make up the Filo collection for Luce di Carrara, led us to work at a open, free form that was shaped by the wire cutting technology and inspired the name of the collection. From the big blocks you get a sort of wing that, if placed standing up and differently

Filomena, cake stand in Statuario Altissimo Photo Nicola Gnesi

48 | Design

matched with two or three identical pieces, creates the self-contained base of the larger tables, with rectangular or round tops. If laid down and cut smaller, it turns into a tray, a centrepiece, a tidy, to mention just a few. Of course this is a work on shapes but it also turns one single form into many different variations. A work that is mainly aimed at exploring the inherent limits of the material, its neveridentical features, until we can master the art of tapering it: this is how Filomena was born.

A new modular cake stand-cumcentrepiece (the base and the serving dish are separate) where the marble has become extremely thin (6 mm) and the “open shape” of the base looks light, in a plastic, structural sense. A sort of material quintessence, “a braiding game”, a ribbon of marble that challenges the

expressive potentials of the material. An exacting, intriguing work – involving constant interaction with the technicians of Henraux-Luce di Carrara – until we manage to entwine the two open shapes and join them at the base in a sophisticated invisible dovetail, giving the “parent” composition a different, freer holding option.

The working process whereby a small block is cut into these two super-thin pieces using diamond-wire technology kindly delivered one extra body, one of a great material impact, that, rendered and processed through more sophisticated polishing cycles, tapered at the ends and edges, and pierced with tiny dots on the heads, suggested that this elegant mould could be one additional new product and a new piece of homeware: a vase.

BY CRAIG COPELAND

MARBLE MAGAZINE:

MATERIAL INTENTIONS FOR SCULPTURE AND DESIGN IN THE 21ST CENTURY N

View of the Cervaiole quarry on Mount Altissimo Photo Craig Copeland

-

D

E

P

T

H

A

N

A

L

Y

S

I

S

Il ritorno del marmo nel mondo moderno, sarà uno degli avvenimenti più clamorosi della seconda metà del secolo.

The return of marble to the modern world is sure to be one of the most striking events in the second half of the century.

Bruno Alfieri, Marmo 1 51 | Architecture

I

1

Marmo 1-5: Chronicling Henraux’s Early Vision

52 | Architecture

Office in Henraux’s old building Photo Craig Copeland

Bruno Alfieri proclaimed in 1962 that the building and art worlds would reembrace marble as a significant material in the works of great architecture and sculpture in the late 20th Century. At the time, there was tremendous hope invested into the mission of Henraux SpA, under the guidance of Erminio Cidonio, to promote an increased use of marble in the greatest works of art and the built environment. It was more than a seemingly self-serving business enterprise. It was a cultural undertaking. After all, by the early 1960’s, Henraux was already beginning to succeed – with its distinctive marbles and fabrication capabilities – to attract and support the world’s greatest artists and architects, from Henry Moore

to Isamu Noguchi.

Marmo would be the publication, begun in 1961, to chronicle and further promote the Henraux mission. And by selecting Alfieri as the editor of the initial edition, Cidonio secured a leading design critic’s viewpoint, identifying and inspiring opportunities to incorporate marble projects that would contribute to the greater cultural continuum. A total of 5 editions would be published, the latest, Marmo 5 in 1971.

I became familiar with these publications, by chance, over 30 years later in 2004, while exploring an abandoned corner of Henraux, in the grand but very dusty “Palazzina”. Earlier Paolo Carli graciously guided me on a complete

Henraux’s mill before renovation Photo Craig Copeland

would revisit the Palazzina many times, read through the Marmo editions, revisit the sculpture collection, and even help to envision a reconfiguration of the buildings to someday house the Henraux Foundation. I remember many conversations I had with Carli, others at Henraux, and even back in New York City, pondering what a contemporary version of the Marmo publication could mean for the promotion of marble in the arts. It took over another decade for such a possibility to emerge. So, it was with great anticipation and excitement that I accepted Henraux’s invitation to participate in their continuation of the publication, restarting with this Marmo 6.

53 | Architecture

tour of Henraux’s facilities, including the stone yard, fabrication lines, and a showing of the company’s small but significant remaining collection of carvings and plaster models from Cidonio’s era. Carli had left me alone in the Palazzina to look around on my own.

In the Palazzina, among various old black and white photos and small stone design accessories, I discovered two different editions of the Marmo collection. It was a small sampling, but more than enough to captivate me and my imagination. What a mystery the books became to me. Carli was aware of them, but like me, he knew only a little about their purpose or larger significance.

Over the course of the next decade, I

2

Marmo 6 and Beyond: Restarting and Restating the Mission of Henraux and the Henraux Foundation

54 | Architecture

Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.

E. O. Wilson, Biophilia

In the spirit of Alfieri’s Marmo 1 proclamation, and at the restarting of this series with Marmo 6, it is suitable to reconsider why and how marble might contribute to our contemporary worlds of art, architecture and design, specifically today. In Alfieri’s time, marble had been shunned because of negative cultural associations to the aristocratic world.

Marble represented an exclusively rich commodity, like gold; and this connotation was counter to the emerging – Post World War II – democratic world view. Materials like concrete and wood were cheaper to acquire, to shape, and therefore appealed to the more egalitarian cultural currents. In the 1960’s, Henraux sought to change the perception and reality. And while there was an intense decade of hard work and promotion under Cidonio’s guidance, the mission was not culturally nor financially sustainable at the time. It would take decades for both the negative Post War associations of material commodity to fade and technology to advance such that marble would be more positively sought and be more readily available. By the early 21st Century, two important circumstances – though somewhat contradicting – would evolve in support of marble’s greater use: advancements in computer technology and the environmental design movement – more specifically the biophilic movement.

In 14 Patterns of Biophilic Design, Terrapin Bright Green explains: “The

term ‘biophilia’ was first coined by social psychologist Eric Fromm (The Heart of Man, 1964) and later popularized by biologist Edward Wilson (Biophilia, 1984). The sundry denotations – which have evolved from within the fields biology and psychology, and been adapted to the fields of neuroscience, endocrinology, architecture and beyond – all relate back to the desire for a (re)connection with nature and natural systems”. By offering direct connections to earth and the natural world, marble helps ground artworks and art experiences to the natural and real world. This is an especially important counterpoint to today’s increasing unreal universe of plastic, man-made and unreal environments. While it is stimulating to augment our lives with experiences through digital worlds of internet clouds, it is well studied through research teams like Terrapin Bright Green that our greatest sustenance comes from earthly connections, between ourselves and the natural world. Marble, whether in the mountain or removed and shaped into our designs, remains of nature, and provides such earthly connection.

Clearly, marble is only one of many possible natural materials from which we might make our art, designs, places, architecture. But marble is distinguished from other natural materials in its direct availability from the earth, unequalled durability, richly varying forms and colors.

Enduring and seemingly everlasting within the perception of our

time, it is no accident that our oldest architecture and artworks are made almost entirely of marble. Marble endures time, both erosions of nature and of culture. Our oldest existing sculptures and buildings are of marble. Perhaps there is something instinctual about our using such a durable material, to sustain our cultural marks seemingly forever, or at least for extremely long periods of time.

Then there is technology, the often double-edged sword of our civilization, a package-deal of negatives and positives.

It is important to acknowledge the contradictions technology provides, and then to seek and seize the best qualities embedded within. The rise of the computer universe in many ways has moved us further from each other – through virtual creations – and the natural world. Ironically, it has also made long distant communications and access to one another more readily available.

One intention of this article is to identify why I believe marble is a material of our time, the early 21st Century, and another intention is to offer tangible, personal examples illustrating how I have embraced the material and contemporary methods of fabrication together, to contribute in the cultural continuum.

I offer two personal journeys of mine in working primarily with marble: in sculpture, and in design.

View of the Cervaiole quarry on Mount Altissimo Photo Nicola Gnesi

3 Carving Marble It is said that stone is the affection of old men. That may be so. It is the most challenging to work. A dialogue ensues – of chance no chance, mistakes no mistakes. No erasing or reproduction is possible, at least in the way I work, leaving nature’s mark. It is unique and final.

Isamu Noguchi

Top, from the design to the completion of Big-Sprout Photo Craig Copeland

56 | Architecture

Right, Craig Copeland working at the Echo Ring Photo Gregor Spänle

I began carving marble when I was already in my early 40’s, in the studio of Renzo Maggi, in Pietrasanta, Italy. Over the course of four months, I learned the fundamentals of clay modeling, plaster casting and stone carving, specifically pointing. I focused on a piece I titled Anello Ritorto (Twisted Ring). Anello Ritorto emerged from an ongoing study I had made in plastic clays over the years – of interactions and struggles between toroidal and organic form. I wanted to utilize marble’s intrinsic sinuous features to suggest human form and human spirit in the figurative profile of the warping torus.

To me the twisting suggested motion and momentum – an eternal, inner force.

Variations of the Anello Ritorto would include both the opening and multiplying of rings or loops. The carving, through pointing, involved a tedious process of measuring and translating points between my plaster model and block of marble – a three-dimensional dot-to-dot of stone surface, composed from hundreds of dots.

The rough cutting alone took me over six

weeks to finish. And while I was happy with the completed work, the process was grueling. The experience gave me a tremendous appreciation for the marble carving methodology of artisans, but I decided the process was not for me.

Following my stay at Maggi’s studio, I returned to New York City where I was fortunate to continue my marble carving in the studio of Venske & Spänle. Both Julia Venske and Gregor Spänle had visited me while I had been in Pietrasanta.

Seeing my new found passion, they invited me to carve alongside them in their Brooklyn studio. For the next five years I worked part time on a series of small abstract figurative pieces. Thanks to Venske & Spänle, I learned how to carve more effectively and direct, with a variety of hand tools, from the pneumatic chisel to hand grinders and box sanders.

And thanks to the encouragement of Phillip Grausman, my longtime drawing and sculpting mentor from graduate school, I proposed and co-curated a show of those first marble carvings,

58 | Architecture

Anello Eco (left) and Big-Sprout (right) Photo Craig Copeland

I scanned the model and measured the blocks to then merge them together into a single 3-D computer model. This was the critical step that combined the traditional sculpting methods with more contemporary virtual checking, adjusting and mapping. It would take me four years of part-time hand-carving, to complete the rough cutting. Anello Eco emerged from Anello Ritorto. The more intimate and soft turning undulations elemental in Anello Ritorto evolved into monumental gestures of twisting planes, establishing an inner, repeating loop - an echo. As with the much smaller Anello Ritorto ten years prior, I was pleased with the completed work, but the process was grueling. I decided this process also was not for me, and that perhaps more robotic rough-cutting should be incorporated into future sculptures.

59 | Architecture

together with ones by Venske & Spänle, at the Washington Art Association in Washington Connecticut. Titled “Liquid Stone”, it was the first showing of my marble sculpture, and in turn lead to my work being selected for the National Academy Museum’s 186th Invitational in New York City.

Within the next year, Venske & Spänle’s studio closed. At the same time, a couple of opportunities emerged for me to begin larger carvings in Italy. I started next with a 4-foot tall piece I titled Big Sprout at Henraux. Six months later, I started my first monumental carving, Anello Eco, at Travertini Paradiso, just outside of Siena. I knew from countless visits to Grausman’s sculpting studio that I would need to have a more measurable plan to better start and complete the larger work. After initial clay and plaster models, and selecting two sister blocks of Silver Travertine,

60 | Architecture

It is my intention to continue with hand-carvings and conceptualizations through robotic carvings in marble, to continue exploring what might be possible in technique and material. It continues to be an incredible journey for me to work with marble.

Detail and render of the “Hybrid+Flexible� modular pavilion Photo Craig Copeland

Design and execution of HX-DNA Photo Craig Copeland

4 After speaking at Marmomacc’s “Designing with Stone” in 2008, I was invited by Paolo Carli to collaborate on the design of an exhibition pavilion with Turan Duda (a close friend, and former colleague at Cesar Pelli & Associates).

Henraux had been invited to participate in a relatively new program in Verona called Marmomacc Meets Design because of historic contributions in the international stone industry. Our goal in addressing the theme of “Hybrid + Flexible” was to demonstrate new ways of approaching and understanding stone’s potential within a contemporary industrial toolbox, and to inspire future experiments to address the question, “How can mass production, made possible by technology, be utilized with hybrid materials and systems, to create infinitely unique forms and architectonic relationships?”.

I focused on addressing “Hybrid + Flexible” developing a unitized pavilion and furnishings composed of hybrid, oak and marble veneer panels. Duda focused on cladding panels. It was the cladding panels that I found most intriguing because they were designed in a way that capitalized so effectively on diamond wire cutting technology to efficiently fabricate volumetric form with minimal material.

Following a two year showing of Henraux’s “Hybrid + Flexible “, I designed a second exhibition for Henraux at the same International Stone Fair in

Verona. Titled Stone Basket Weave, the design won the premier “Best Communicator” Award for the 2011 Marmomacc Stone Fair. Stone Basket Weave included repetitive geometricbiomorphic patterns in low-relief panels of statuary white Altissimo marble, in the spirit of Jean Arp. It was my first experience in conceiving a design to be fabricated by CNC carving.

In 2012, I collaborated again with Henraux for Marmomacc. This time, the idea was to showcase the interface between computer modeling and robotic carving.

I wanted to demonstrate that while stone is inorganic, much of its intrinsic beauty arrives from the seemingly organic, structured movements of the earth’s minerals, captured and revealed in richly varying colorations and veining. The HX-DNA forms developed in the design built upon conceptual plays of the hidden forms and primary building blocks of our physical world: DNA. The pavilion was titled, “HX: The DNA of Stone,” and was inspired by the organic metaphor of biological structure - namely DNA. The signature structure of DNA, the double helix, inspired the variety of freestanding structures and low-relief panels featured in the HX–DNA forms. Joining 3-D iterations of Henraux’s trademark H and X vertically, undulating stone strands ascended into rich, figurative forms suggestive of DNA spirals.

61 | Architecture

Marble Design

Project for EMc2: Essential Marmo Collection

5

62 | Architecture

Collective Marble Applications: Situcraft

Right, Stone Basket Weave, Statuario Altissimo marble Photo Craig Copeland

In 2016, following an intense decade of hands-on marble explorations and research – ranging from direct carvings to computer-designed collaborations in robotic milling – I started a new company called Situcraft. The objective in launching the enterprise was to establish a culturally and financially sustainable design company focused first and foremost on marble designs and products. The initial goal was to create a line of furnishings titled EMc2: Essential Marble Collection. The concept was to establish a design series of one or more essential marble centerpieces for each room in a home and/or office: a marble dining table, a marble vanity, a marble

bedframe, a marble desk. There are now prototypes developing ready-to-use kits-of-parts, such that all pieces might be made to order to project specific dimensions, as elegant compositions in distinctive marbles.

As Situcraft evolves, it is my intention to continue with hand-carvings and conceptualizations through robotic carvings in marble, to continue exploring what might be possible in technique and material. It continues to be an incredible journey for me to work with marble. I therefore hope my enthusiasm will inspire others to seek and continue – in their own ways – the excitement I have experienced through marble.

63 | Architecture

BY ELEONORA CARACCIOLO DI TORCHIAROLO

MARCO CASAMONTI

MARBLE, WHERE DESIGN, ART AND ARCHITECTURE MEET

64 | Design

I

N

T

E

We meet Professor Marco Casamonti in his studio, in Florence. His career is a combination of design, research and critical reflection.

Founding partner of Studio Archea – which has branches in Florence, Rome, Milan as well as outside the national borders such as in Dubai, Beijing and São Paolo – Casamonti and his team composed of architects, designers and researchers, specialise in architectural, urban, landscape and industrial design.

Over the years, while working as a designer and lecturer – in 2004 he was

R

V

I

E

W

appointed full professor at the Faculty of Architecture in Genoa and given the title of visiting professor and critic in Barcelona, Graz, Mendrisio, Zurich, Sao Paolo, Beijing, Vancouver –, he has been deeply engaged in critical reflections on architecture behalf which he has published many essays and articles.

Lastly, he has left his mark in the publishing world as well: editor in chief of the international architecture magazine Area from 1995 and scientific manager for architecture for Federico Motta Editore until 2012.

Left Sketch by Terreria/Marmeria Marco Casamonti, Studio Archea Right Marmeria, Marco Casamonti, Studio Archea Photo Nicola Gnesi

How are art, architecture and design related to each other, and what role can marble play in each one?

marble must consider its distinctive features, which are about durability, hardness, adaptability».

«In creative arts I believe there’s no actual difference between art, architecture and design, because all three have to do with design, and the creative approach to each material is the same».

Why using such material in design, and what are its inherent limitations?

«I think the material you work with remarkably affects the design. You cannot design a work of architecture, art or an object d’art without considering the tools or materials you have to make it with. Like any stone, marble provides outstanding opportunities. Of course, when you work, you must think that your material has a substance of its own, a “soul” of its own, a genetic code of its own that cannot be altered, but must actually be turned into an opportunity. Each time we find ourselves working with a material such as marble, first we must try to emphasise its physical-surface qualities: with Carrara marble – like everybody knows – for instance, its whiteness must be a key component of the project. Or, again, the fact that no two types of marble or stone are alike: you cannot ask marble to behave like any material that can be painted or lacquered, I mean, you cannot ask it to be consistent, you have to work with its changeability. Such little changes in the material’s natural substance are a key value. It would be like asking wood to have all the veins at the same distance, without any flaws. Which are not flaws, they are proof that it is a natural material.

Any designer who has to work with

When you work, you must think that your material has a substance of its own, a “soul” of its own, a genetic code of its own that cannot be altered, but must actually be turned into an opportunity.

Tell us about the Marmeria, the project you developed for Henraux.

«The Marmeria is an example of what I was talking about. The Marmeria is the transposition of a meaning, the transposition of the Terreria, which we designed for Moroso and that Henraux produces under licence, with marble.

The Terreria is a bookcase, which would normally be made from wood, but made out of clay. This change of meaning, this

Left Marmeria, Marco Casamonti, Studio Archea Photo Nicola Gnesi

67 | Design

So, let’s put it this way: can a material affect, direct or help a work of architecture, design or art?

«There are many items of common use that require the inherent features of marble. I am thinking for example of urban design, which requires the durability, thermal inertia, adaptability of a material like marble.

Of course, there are always exceptions.

For instance, for the heritage Up & Up company, Aldo Rossi took an ordinary piece of furniture – granny’s country table – and turned it into a marble table: by using that material, he turned an ordinary piece of furniture into something precious. In that case, there was a sort of inconsistency: such inconsistency is a creative, artistic operation in itself, an operation that urges design to broaden its horizons. In design, I think marble opens up a wide range of extraordinary opportunities, from the chance to use a different material to make something that has been traditionally thought of as a different texture, to solving problems that other materials could not».

68 | Design

Terreria Designed by Studio Archea for Moroso

shifted horizon brings in an outstanding change in the creative arena. Therein lies the value of the project. The Marmeria is a modular bookcase that, unlike an ordinary bookcase, has no constraints on its size: depending on how you fit the parts together, the bookcase can be adapted to any space, whether it is a house, an office or a museum.

The bookcase has just five parts, and you can combine these five parts in a multitude of ways. After all, if you are passionate about design, you want to have a piece of industrial design – a perfect item – that is one of a kind. Industrial design has never managed to achieve this. Being serial adds value to a designer piece but it is also a limitation. Industrial design produces items that are all alike.

Which is quite the opposite of an object d’art, which is as valuable as it is unique, unrepeatable.

We tried to design an object, a bookcase, that is unique in every single part and, because of this, verges on the object d’art: depending on the way you fit the parts together, how you combine them, you get something different every time.

The principle is the same as the one you would apply to a building, with bricks:

a multitude of different combinations of bricks can produce a multitude of architectures. The component is the same, but the result is different every time.

Here it is. This is the idea behind this design that is halfway between a piece of architecture – because we have built a brick or five bricks, if you like – because they are always one-off buildings – and an interior design item because it is an item that is used at home.

Marble has given this ordinary item an extraordinary character that we gave Moroso when we decided to turn an ordinary bookcase into a clay object and called it Terreria».

How did the idea for the Terreria, and then that of the Marmeria, come about?

«In my opinion, one of the most outstanding designer items is the Vespa scooter designed by Corradino D’Ascanio. In the post-war period, Corradino D’Ascanio had to come up with a new means of transportation. Piaggio made airplanes and, by combining the small wheels of an undercarriage with a starter, D’Ascanio invented something new that is still going strong. As with

Moroso, Terreria Photo Pietro Savorelli

many design projects, then, the Vespa scooter was born out of necessity. After all, we did something very similar: when we had to design the Antinori winery and had to work with earth, we thought that none of the “fleet” of the company’s bookcases should be wood, it should not be made from a material that had been cut off, but a live material that could ideally bring something else to life. So we took the earth from the vineyards, we mixed it with water, baked it with fire and produced the elements of the Terreria.

What we did was shifting the meaning, something that was born of need, just like the Vespa. Henraux joined this Terreria project, thinking they could produce the same piece in marble. At first I thought you couldn’t take some marble blocks and slice them down until they were as thin as the walls of a castle of cards, but Henraux proved that could be done. Actually, such parts were strong and light and we were pleasantly surprised to see that, using the wire cutting technology, Henraux had managed to produce the Marmeria.

I think this project can evolve into other materials as well, but for the time being we’ll stop at marble, because what we have achieved with marble is something really outstanding».

Can you name a place where you have used the Marmeria?

70 | Design

«I could mention a lot of places, but I’ll pick three. As we usually do, first we tested the project ourselves by assembling it at Spazio A, in Florence, next to our studio. We installed it again at Henraux’s, at the Verona marble fair: there, we turned

the Marmeria into a system that could be used to build the walls of a booth, just to close a space.Then, we installed the Marmeria in an artistic venue, at Galerie Tornabuoni Art in Paris, during an exhibition about Alighiero Boetti.

Somehow, in Boetti’s art, the subjects of assemblage and composition closely deal with the way he works. If we think of Boetti’s alphabets, airplanes, covers, they are combinations and assemblages of slightly changed objects: which is exactly what the Marmeria is too.

For us, the Marmeria is like a piece of music: any orchestra conductor may play the same music but the concert will never be the same. Likewise, we think these five pieces can be matched into always different – always outstanding – pieces».

How have you transposed these concepts from art and design to architecture and interior design? We are thinking in particular of your project for Luce di Carrara.

«As I said before, the creative and inventive processes are always different, because they were born of necessity, still they obey to the same rules. And such rules are: understand the place and the substance, appreciate their inner soul. In this case, we did not merely design a showroom for Luce di Carrara: we changed a place, which used to be a workplace, into an exhibition venue.

The essence of this project lies in such transposition: we want anyone who steps into the Luce di Carrara showroom to feel they are not just in a store, but feel the soul of the work that has always been

We would like the Luce di Carrara showroom to be such a crossbreed: between a factory, a workplace, a place that masters a technology, a material, and an exhibition venue. If a space can express all this, then we will have made something important.

carried out in those places. Work can be felt in the trusses, in the size of the space, in the exposed steel beams. You feel that what is on display there is the result of that work, of that heritage. So, in the project you breathe the world of work, of design, of art and ultimately you breathe the feeling that, to make a product, you also need to make it known, to explain it, just as you would do in a museum. We would like the Luce di Carrara showroom to be such a crossbreed: between a factory, a workplace, a place that masters a technology, a material, and an exhibition venue. If a space can express all this, then

we will have made something important.

Of course, you will not find marble floors in there, you wouldn’t trample on marble, it is a material that must be very warily treated. There will be a concrete floor, as in an industrial space. But lots of applications of marble will be on display in that area.

We think this sort of factory-cum-museum is the best way of celebrating work and the marble-processing skills, but above all of telling the story of the way, through human ingenuity, nature turns into art, architecture, designÂť.

71 | Design

Render of the new Luce di Carrara showroom, designed

by Studio Archea, Firenze

72 | Art

BY FLAVIO ARENSI

MIMMO PALADINO

FROM ARCHAISM TO GEOMETRIC NEOCLASSICISM I

N

T

E

After taking its distance from traditional sculpture in the Seventies, Mimmo Paladino makes a foray into the international scene and embraces a new process of dialogue with the past, with the avant-garde, but above all he reopens a space of creative freedom. The recovery of materials, such as bronze or terracotta and stone, stems off from his renewed interest in handicrafts, which do not let itself be replaced by technology. On the other side, a theoretical vision reflects the innovative implications brought about by the overwhelming contexts developed on the American and European scenes.

Paladino does not try to get back to an academic idea of sculpting; he even jumps over the criticism that could come from Arte Povera or conceptual supporters; he tries instead to look to a different future, justifying his aesthetic choices on the ground of an altogether innovative realisation or philosophy. Therefore he

R

V

I

E

W

enfranchises materials that had been segregated or disavowed by the earlier trends (though they were eventually bought back to in their more recent market placement) but he uses them for a different artistic vision. While, in painting, the case of his Silenzioso, mi ritiro a dipingere un quadro (made by Paladino in 1977, editor’s note) sees painting embodying linguistic freedom as a revolutionary gesture that challenges the end of the painting art, Paladino’s sculpture is a trailblazer in the development of the plastic form, in which space and architecture step in as complementary linguistic features of a territory where the boundaries with painting are blurred.

In his studio at Paduli, two big round geometrical shapes – a red one and a black one – are arranged on the longer walls of the entrance, and as many silhouettes lean on it, starting from the centre, poised in mid-air.

73 | Art

Mimmo Paladino next to La Croce installation, 2012, Piazza Santa Croce, Firenze Photo Veronica Gaido

Mimmo, are your geometries, first and foremost the 1985 Non avrà titolo, the connecting link between painting and sculpting?

«The underlying principle brings everything back to the geometrical idea of the work or, if you like, to an accurate mathematical rigidity. It may eventually betrayed by figurative inlays, which may be bronze, aluminium, brushstrokes or small objects».

So in the end there is not distinction between these techniques: everything is intended to achieve an all-encompassing goal that goes beyond either language.

«I cannot make a clear distinction between sculpting and painting, neither do I think it makes any sense, because, even as I work at a painting, I often venture into protruding materials, objects, bulks; I have never – or hardly ever – made a painting that can be regarded as “polished”, minimal, while I have always opted for thick sculptures, because they must take in the light, with all that it means».

What was your first encounter with stone?

74 | Art

«I made my very first sculpture over thirty years ago, when I stole a block of white tufa off a road that ran not far from here, at Paduli, and ran away because I thought the farmer was after me. As soon as I was back in my studio, I started to sculpt it with a hammer and a chisel, then I put it in a painting called Isola, probably in an Austrian collection today».

I had always wanted to do to understand more about the material. My approach was actually wanting to carve a parallelepiped into a shape that came out as I went. What came out of that was a sort of archaic bust on which I later painted over, as I did on with my first bronze (Giardino Chiuso (Hortus Conclusus), 1982, now at the Rivoli Castle, editor’s note), borrowing the formula from the ancient masters, so as to immediately get rid of all that rhetoric that has grown around bronze and marble».

The Rivoli sculpture is your first bronze ever.

«Until then, I had not been interested in that kind of works, but as it often the case I happened to do some moulding or some other coincidence. In that year, a gallery owner named Emilio Mazzoli asked me to have a try at it and advised me to work in Pietrasanta. That’s how Giardino Chiuso (now in Rivoli) came to life. Thinking about sculpting, I could not but look to Arturo Martini, with his geometrical compositions and the archaic fixedness of his figures, yet maybe even a touch out of time for an artist who was working in an age that looked to other artists: believe me, Martini had fallen into oblivion, and his works were centuries away from the tastes of the time, but maybe I felt that, behind a certain Italian sculpture, one could not help going through his genius».

What next?

The «rhetoric» you are talking about has been undermined by the movements that began to reject tradition and its materials in the Sixties. Today, the attitude to bronze and above all to marble has changed.

«I ordered some Vicenza stone that I had carried to Milan and started to work it as they did in the old times. It was something

«The world around sculpture has changed.

Not many sculptures were made thirty years ago, and we are speaking of the big

75 | Art

Mimmo Paladino next to his work Untitled, 1990, painted bronze Photo Lorenzo Palmieri

Mimmo Paladino, La croce, 2012, Piazza Santa Croce, Firenze Photo Lorenzo Palmieri

I cannot make a clear distinction between sculpting and painting, neither do I think it makes any sense, because, even as I work at a painting, I often venture into protruding materials, objects, bulks; I have never made a painting that can be regarded as “polished”, minimal.

old masters, Moore, Caro – to mention just a few –, I am thinking of Perez in Naples, while the young artists were more focussed on installations. One should not forget that, in the more avant-garde or experimental circles, speaking of bronze or – even worse – using marble, was a problem. Now, instead, not least because of the new technological opportunities, anyone can give a file and have a work made, without having to put in any personal effort. But this is not sculpting, this is a conceptual gesture, thinking of an idea, voicing it and commissioning it to someone else».

Even among the young artists, some were looking for a way that ran close to tradition; after all sculpture has never disappeared and the quarries have never been closed.

«Of course, and likewise there have always been painters who painted but they brought up the rear of what was going on – or had been going on – in other words, of what was a more contemporary view: it is not about the medium or the method, it is about how to organise the materials or the material to do the job. The watershed is conceptual art, which – maybe driven by a Duchamplike will – can annihilate the materials and even the emotions, to convey an intellectual message that is an end in itself».

78 | Art

Church of Santa Croce and the artist’s installation Photo Veronica Gaido

So the turning point was not in looking nostalgically back to what people were doing, but in differently asserting a new commitment to total freedom.

«Yes. In the Eighties the fact that anything could be used began to be seen as a good thing. This clearly broke open a door that had been shut by the avant-garde for decades and everything spilled out, even the chance to use materials that had been put aside for a theoretical reason: marble, bronze or even glass».

How do you see marble? You eventually made a work out of it, Stele…

«I have always seen it as a material associated with classicism, while I look for a material that is more connected with the archaic flavour of sculpture, such as tufa. Apart from this , what I have been interested in is the new technology, with which the replica of a model can be very accurately made, while I work stone “live”; for the monolith Stele, I had a deeply geometrical, sharp-edged design in my mind, with perfectly flattened surfaces, to enhance not just the qualities of the material but also the technological opportunity to reproduce a perfect shape. I could jokingly say it is a sort of geometrical neoclassicism».

79 | Art

80 | Art

In Florence in 2012, before Santa Croce, you made an installation that revolved around the use of marble.

Does your interest in archaism begin with your first photographic works back in the Seventies?

«The whole square had been invaded with shapeless blocks supplied by Henraux that I needed to evoke ancient, or better, archaic figures, because that was marble stripped down to its most natural state, when it is cut out of the Apuan Alps. I had put Stele on one of those blocks in a specific relation with the statue of Dante on the parvis».

«It was not born in that medium, of course, but the view I had was associated with antiquity, a sort of magical element, something that had to do with fire, with the moon, with mysterious characters in the dark or a non-technological, metropolitan dimension».

When you arrange an architectural space, you have to reckon with the surrounding features as well: in the Hortus Conclusus in Benevento, the visitors also have to deal with the cloister your works are displayed in.

«Once again, everything happened by chance. I cannot move a centuries-old tree or a medieval wall, but I can bend them, make them fit in with my purpose. Here I decided to create a place, not a sculpture, using available features to which I would add new ones, but the intention was the same, giving out a positive vibe, because there’s the light of sunset that plays with the shape of the horse, then you find the set stone. In other words a sort of small garden of wonders but not a baroque one, an extremely sleek, pondered, minimal one. And anyone who comes in will come out with a personal experience, different from anyone else’s experience».

Was that a theoretical need, in the artistic system of that time, or a poetical need?

«It was a baggage of shapes that could come handy, though I came from Pop Art or, better, from Rauschenberg’s neoDadaism, which I had seen at the Venice Biennale when I was fourteen (1964, editor’s note), so that was a break, an avant-garde gesture that had nothing to do with traditional painting».

Have you retained a photographic outlook in your works? Do you use it to build its structures?

«It depends on the work. The last one I exhibited at the Biennale is very photographic, I may say, because it’s graphical, because it could be a line drawn in the air, a stroke, a black and white.

Other things, such as tufa, are largely dependent on what they are themselves, that is, the porosity of the material».

For the monolith Stele, I had a deeply geometrical, sharpedged design in my mind, with perfectly flattened surfaces, to enhance not just the qualities of the material but also the technological opportunity to reproduce a perfect shape.

81 | Art

Mimmo Paladino, La croce, 2012, Piazza Santa Croce, Firenze (detail) Photo Valentina Fogher

Marva Griffin Wilshire Photo Nicola Gnesi

BY MARVA GRIFFIN WILSHIRE

TWENTY YEARS OF SALONESATELLITE C

H

I

E

V

E

M

E

N

T

S

All the definitions the SaloneSatellite has earned – springboard, showcase, stage, catwalk, flagship, trailblazer – are due to the visibility it gives to young designers and their designs.

83 | Design

A

84 | Design

The SaloneSatellite has not only been pioneer of shows for young talents and a forerunner in the exhibition methods: its formula has also been copied by many fairs across the world.

My journey in the world of design began in the Seventies with C&B Italia (today B&B Italia), set up by two great interior design businessmen: Piero Ambrogio Busnelli and Cesare Cassina. First as an assistant, as an interpreter in their endless travels around the five continents, then as communication manager. It was an unique experience that I endured as Italian correspondent for Maison&Jardin and Vogue Decoration by Les Publications Condé Nast France and for House&Garden and American Vogue

by The Condé Nast Publications USA. For nine years during the Eighties, Beppe Modenese and I organised “Incontri Venezia – il tessuto nell’arredamento”, in Palazzo Grassi, at Hotel Excelsior-Lido and at the Giardini of Venice Biennale. It was after that experience, in the Nineties, that Manlio Armellini asked me to join him in the organisation of the Salone Internazionale del Mobile to manage the foreign press relations and arrange the Salone del Complemento d’Arredo.

Finally, in 1997, he asked me to conceive the SaloneSatellite.

Armellini, back then the CEO at Cosmit Spa, the company that organised the Salone Internazionale del Mobile, asked me to create an event to support the development of the most promising young designers’ careers by putting them in touch with the Fair’s exhibitors.

It instantly turned into an unrivalled

observation post of international young creativity. Since then, since 1998, every April, over 10.000 young men and women and 280 international design schools have met on this stage.

I see the SaloneSatellite as a school, because young designers (under 35) are just starting out – some of them have just graduated from the universities and design schools that are actually participating in the event. Such “school” has been a source of endless joy for me, as it has received so many accolades. Its intended goal has been fully met: bringing the younger, more dynamic and creative members back to Salone del Mobile.

The daily mission of SaloneSatellite is putting designers in touch with producers, with the media and the public. Its role is to act as a go-to place, a place where businessmen and new talents meet and exchange ideas: in other words, as a talent scouting site. The young come to be noticed by producers and opinion leaders and then they find an opportunity to show their products and make their creativity known, then they grow into international stars. Hundreds of projects are submitted as prototypes to SaloneSatellite first home made then as industrial prototypes mainly produced by Italian companies. Some since the very first year, some after three years. Now, I can proudly show a long list of designers from many countries who

A fitting at SaloneSatellite (Courtesy of Salone del Mobile.Milano)

85 | Design

Pictures of SaloneSatellite Photo Carola Merello (Courtesy of Salone del Mobile.Milano)

86 | Design

have been at the SaloneSatellite and are now successful designers, such as – to mention just a few – Lorenzo Damiani, Patrick Jouin, Nendo, Satyendra Pakhalé, Harri Koskinen, Xavier Lust.

All the definitions the SaloneSatellite has earned – “springboard”, “showcase”, “stage”, “catwalk”, “flagship”, “trailblazer” – are due to the visibility it gives to young designers and their designs.

For the young, the SaloneSatellite is a piazza with an international atmosphere and a lot of mutual involvement. The general opinion is that the climate is refreshing, experimental and inventive.

It has not only been pioneer of shows for young talents and a forerunner in the exhibition methods: its formula has also

been copied by many fairs across the world.

In April 2017, the SaloneSatellite will turn twenty, and two events will celebrate this anniversary: in Halls 2224 of the Fair, world-class designers will “metaphorically” come back home by showcasing new products made for the companies or by themselves for the “Collezione SaloneSatellite 20 Anni”; an exhibition at Fabbrica del Vapore, called “SaloneSatellite. 20 anni di nuova creatività”, will exhibit the prototypes that, since 1998, young designers have presented and that have been and are produced by Italian and international companies.

Pictures of SaloneSatellite Photo Alessandro Russotti and Carola Merello (Courtesy of Salone del Mobile.Milano)

BY ALDO COLONETTI

DESIGN AND MARBLE:

BEING EVERYWHERE WITHOUT FORGETTING WHERE WE COME FROM I

N

S

I

G

H

T

S

88 | Design

Molletta, designed by Baldessari & Baldessari, in partnership with Riva 1920 Photo Nicola Gnesi

Of course you need to interact with a contemporary culture of materials that are more and more sophisticated, light, almost “metaphysical�, but this does not mean that what is transformed by nature in its long times, does not have expressive qualities that could serve our society.

90 | Design

Materials are a prerequisite to design objects and products that can withstand the test of time; a time, ours, that is increasingly omnivorous and above all resistant to memory: and without memory you won’t go anywhere.

Of course you need to interact with a contemporary culture of materials that are more and more sophisticated, light, almost “metaphysical”, but this does not mean that what is transformed by nature in its long times, does not have expressive qualities that could serve our society.

Marble is one of the most ancient

materials as well as one of the most commonly used in architecture and design, especially where one must express values and purposes that must withstand the test, not just the symbolic one, of contemporary design.

What is the meaning, for instance, of having someone to design a chair that can retain the intrinsic qualities of the stone and that can also convey stability, lightness and above all contemporariness? Of course you will start by choosing the right marble, working with the thickness and the “pliability” of the material, possibly

often full of facts, of narratives, that belong to tradition.

First you need to engage in a conceptual process, Duchamp-style. Then you need to interact with all those designers who come from afar, not distant in space or scope, but distant in their “cultural fundamentals”. This means having all those cultural landmarks upon which any creative gesture is built, because that is the only way to produce works and designs that may seem predictable but are in fact “normal”, à la Duchamp.

Looking at the world from different perspectives, starting from a detail to get

91 | Design

combining ever-different surface patterns – which shall still produce a systematic effect – until you achieve a final result that speaks the language of the present, without losing sight of its ancient value: as if it were beyond time, as if it had always been there.

All this is difficult, but therein lies the challenge: conceiving something that must be timeless by combining materials such as marble that, as well as having the value of “gravitas”, as aptly argued

by Mario Botta in the talk published in this issue of Marmo, has a symbolic repertoire of deep historical relevance,

The modernity of a material is measured not as much by how well it can blend in and come “under false colours”, as if undergoing to narrative different from the traditional one, so that it can be itself and its opposite at the same time.

92 | Design

Macchietta quarry Henraux Photo Nicola Gnesi

to the final shape, giving pride of place to a seeming normality, which is instead the epitome of the unexpected.

When it must be used to design a product, marble needs such philosophy without being disloyal to its identity; an aesthetics that somehow deviates the meaning as in a sort of “de-contextualisation”, so as to “shift its place” in the interpretative memory, to make it more “lay” then than the traditional models it takes inspiration from.

The modernity of a material is measured not as much by how well it can blend in and come “under false colours”, as if undergoing to narrative different from the traditional one, so that it can be itself and its opposite at the same time.

Like any other material that comes from afar, which has been very successful

and very popular in distant, ritual-based times, marble has outstanding potentials, the potential of naming past and future together, while we are glad to leave the present to all those expressions that belong more to chronicle than to History: being timeless nowadays is a value, on condition you are always yourself while also living in your time, looking ahead.

This is what you embrace with your eyes and with your mind when, from the top of Mount Altissimo, you look towards the sea, at its boundless horizon and at the same time at the coast, the houses, our villages blurring into the light of marble: at the centre of it all, there’s always man, his ability to turn a block of marble into a set of items that will eventually travel all over the world, even if they will never forget where they come from.

93 | Design

Mount Altissimo Photo Nicola Gnesi

BY COSTANTINO PAOLICCHI

1517- 2017

THE 500TH ANNIVERSARY OF MICHELANGELO ON MOUNT ALTISSIMO I

N

-

D

E

P

T

H

A

N

A

L

Y

S

I

S

96 | Art

Daniele da Volterra, Face of an apostle resembling Michelangelo, 1550-1552

was any good quality white marble seam, as everyone believed, or if instead the rumours the Pope had heard that going there, in those impassable places, amidst people who did not have the centuriesold and skills of Carrara’s quarrymen, was just a waste of time and money, was to be believed. The Vestry Board of Santa Maria del Fiore and the Pope needed lots of marble for Florence’s and Rome’s buildings, and that’s why in May 1515 they had asked and obtained from the communities of Seravezza and Cappella an official deed with which they gave over their mountains for free, first and foremost the Altissimo, which was believed to have marble to quarry.

Julius II, born Giuliano della Rovere, had died in 1513, and cardinal Giovanni dei Medici was enthroned as Pope Leo X. One of the new Pope’s first deeds was, in that very year, the ruling (or award) with which he gave the Captaincy of Pietrasanta over to Florence, taking it off Lucca and putting an end to their year-long disputes. Since the Middle Ages – maybe even earlier than that – the Captaincy had a few smallish quarries, known as marmoraie, which produced the marble for the Romanesque churches of Santo Stefano at Vallecchia and San Martino at Cappella. But very few were the stonecutters who occasionally worked for the Vestry Board of Santa Maria del Fiore or for the buildings in Pisa.

Since the age of his Pietà when he was

It is a mountain that over the centuries has charmed sculptors, such as Michelangelo himself, such as Giambologna, such as the American Hiram Powers in the mid-19th century, such as the French Auguste Rodin in the early 20th century, such as the British Henry Moore in the Sixties.

97 | Art

Five hundred years ago, Michelangelo Buonarroti climbed for the first time up on Mount Altissimo, an imposing, charming mountain in Seravezza, owned by Henraux since 1821. Though not one of the highest peaks of the Apuan Alps, Mount Altissimo has earned this name, Highest, since time immemorial because its southern side – the most scenic one – seems to rise dazzlingly high above sea level, much higher than its modest 1550 metres. It is a mountain that over the centuries has charmed sculptors, such as Michelangelo himself, such as Giambologna – who in 1568 used the very first block of statuary marble dug out of the freshly-opened quarries to make a Vittoria now in the Bargello Museum – ; such as the American Hiram Powers in the mid19th century, such as the French Auguste Rodin in the early 20th century, such as the British Henry Moore in the Sixties, when Henraux, led by Erminio Cidonio, opened an international centre for contemporary sculpture at Querceta.

Around January 20th, 1517, Michelangelo had struggled up there through freshlycut tracks along the dazzlingly sheer, wild slopes of the valley of torrent Serra, springing out of the Polla that sits just at the foot of the mountain. He had not been there for a race, he was not a forerunner of modern hikers. He had gone up there because he had been sent by Pope Leo X and the Vestry Board of Santa Maria del Fiore for a survey and to see if there

98 | Art

just twenty-four years old, in 1497, Michelangelo had stocked up on marble in Carrara where he had good connections with Marquis Alberico Malaspina. He had bought a lot of it in 1505 for the monumental tomb of Julius II, a project that had fallen through and had added insult to injury for the sculptor, tragically escaped to Florence. Then, having finished

the Sistine Chapel and after Julius’s death, the sculptor had put together some new projects and entered into new agreements with the heirs to make the tomb – a smaller one with few statues, yet still impressive – to be placed in St Peter’s, in Vatican City. Michelangelo had committed not to accept any other job until that one was finished.

Antonio Puccinelli (1822-1890), Michelangelo in the Carrara quarries, circa 1860 Photo Archivio Bessi, Carrara Right, Leo X among Cardinals Giulio de’ Medici and Luigi de’ Rossi, Raphael, 1518

99 | Art

100 | Art

Mount Altissimo Photo F. Tarabella about 1960

Pontiff’s permission, Michelangelo was committed to make two major works at the same time. Completely uninterested in the Pope’s plans for Pietrasanta, the sculptor was getting ready to take all the marble he needed from his regular suppliers in Carrara. So, he had put up a veritable business, he had “partnered” with some local quarrymen in order to share the costs and the profits, and he had even tried to pocket some of the money charged to the Pope. This was almost immediately noticed by the Vatican’s agent, Domenico Boninsegni, through a simple market survey, and the sculptor had to leave the business and apologise.

Since insisting rumours, deliberately spread maybe by Buonarroti himself, tried to debase the marble from Carrara, on the first few days of January 1517, the Pope and the Vestry Board ruled that a special

The sculptor had “partnered” with some local quarrymen in order to share the costs and the profits, and he had even tried to pocket some of the money charged to the Vatican.

101 | Art

During his sumptuous visit to Florence on November 30th 1515, Pope Leo X, in the interest of his city, had thought of associating his name with some major work, so he decided to make the unfinished façade of St. Lorenzo, the church of the Medici family, largely designed by Brunelleschi. Many architects and artists of undisputed fame, including Giuliano da Sangallo and Raphael, immediately prepared some drawings, but Michelangelo – having heard rumours about this – promptly set to work and prepared a number of sketches. In midDecember 1516, he went from Carrara to Rome to personally make a drawing of the façade, which was approved by the Pontiff. It should have been, in its architecture and sculptures, «the finest work ever made in Italy», as Buonarroti said himself. At that point, with the

The cardinal wouldn’t hear of it. Putting aside any respect and esteem he had for the artist, he told him that he wanted at all costs «li marmi di Pietrasancta et non altri», («marble from Pietrasanta and no others»), to be used in all the works that had to be built in St Peter’s in Rome, in Santa Reparata and for the façade of San Lorenzo in Florence.

committee, composed of Iacopo Salviati, a prominent figure of the Signoria, Iacopo Sansovino, Michelangelo, maybe Donato Benti and other experts, should quickly go up to Mount Altissimo to see if there was any suitable marble for decorative works, architecture or sculpture. The Signoria and the Pope wanted to escape their centuries-old dependence on Carrara, which had a monopoly on the quarrying and trade of marble, and open a business in the Captaincy, partly in the interest of the local population that had very few resources, especially on the mountains, where only subsistence farming could be practised. That’s why in the first few days of 1516 the Vestry Board had started to build the Via Nuova di Marina, to connect the quarries of Seravezza to the sea.

The Committee had found that there were wide seams of white marble and even discovered fields of statuary marble with an extremely fine texture that were no less beautiful than those of Carrara. So, the venture had to go on with suitable funds, since the prospects were good. It was then that they began to pile pressure on Michelangelo to leave Carrara and

go to Seravezza to start up the quarries of the Vestry Board on the mountain at Ceragiola, Cappella, Trambiserra and on Mount Altissimo. And he was also asked to take care of the building of the marble road that ran to the quarries the Serra Valley. But the sculptor turned a deaf ear and did not budge, to the point that he soon incurred the wrath of Leo X, cardinal Giulio dei Medici and the Vestry Board, which openly accused him of thinking of his own interest only. On February 2nd 1517, cardinal Giulio de’ Medici sent a very harsh letter to Michelangelo in which he suggested that the Pope and him wanted only marble from the Captaincy to be used, so the sculptor had to abide by their decision and do as he was told. The cardinal openly challenged his words when he said such marble was unsuitable. He had read the report written

by Salviati who had been on the quarries of Seravezza and stated that «there was plenty of marble, beautiful and easy to handle». So he expressly referred to the outcome of his survey on Mount Altissimo which Michelangelo had taken part in himself, while now he was taking

102 | Art

Michelangelo, Drawing for the elevation of the Church of San Lorenzo (final drawing), Firenze, Casa Buonarroti

103 | Art

104 | Art

Mount Altissimo Photo Nicola Gnesi

lying there, all fine and ready and all paid up.

Driven mad by the behaviour of his former mates, and tired of the injunctions and rebukes of his clients, in the early 1518 Michelangelo – after entering into an agreement for the façade – unwillingly accepted to move to Seravezza and look after the new quarries of the Vestry Board of Santa Maria del Fiore. On March 15th of that year, in Pietrasanta, he entered an agreement with a group of stonecutters from Settignano and with a quarryman from Azzano, Bastiano d’Angiolo di Benedetto known as Angelotto, drawn up

by Giovanni Badessi, Notary Public, the first of a number of agreements for the supply of all the marble for the façade of San Lorenzo. It was the beginning of the hardest, most troubled time of his life, when he was forced to take care of roads and quarries, of lazy, incompetent stonecutters, sea and river carriages, without any time to do his own job, the sculptor. Just two years later, with an unexpected “breve”, Pope Leo X relieved him of his duties. The façade of San

Lorenzo, which was never finished, and the tomb of Julius II, finished decades later in forms that were more modest and different from his plans and his intentions, no longer placed in St Peter’s in Vatican City but in San Pietro in Vincoli, would be the great “tragedies” of his artistic and human experience. As he was approaching old age, he realised he had been used by the Pope and by the Medici cardinal. That he had been the unwitting instrument in a deliberate political plan: the Medici did not want the Della Rovere Pope to be buried as he was a close relation of the Dukes of Urbino, who would be dethroned soon after. He gloomily and painfully stated, in a letter dated 1542: «In questo tempo papa Leone, non volendo che io facessi detta sepoltura, finse di volere fare in Firenze la facciata di San Lorenzo…» («In these years, Pope Leo, not wanting me to make such tomb, pretended he wanted to make the façade of St Lorenzo in Florence…»).

In the end, he too, the great sculptor, the unrivalled painter and architect, had been a victim of the arrogance and schemes of the powerful.

105 | Art

a contradictory stance to protect his own interests. However, the cardinal wouldn’t hear of it. Putting aside any respect and esteem he had for the artist, he told him that he wanted at all costs «li marmi di Pietrasancta et non altri», («marble from Pietrasanta and no others»), to be used in all the works that had to be built in St Peter’s in Rome, in Santa Reparata and for the façade of San Lorenzo in Florence.

They believed they would be cheaper than those of Carrara. But, even if they had costed more, «… vole ad omni modo Sua Santità che così si faccia, per indrizare et aviare questo maneggio di Pietrasancta per l’utile publico della città», («His Holiness wants this to be done at all costs, to open this business in Pietrasanta in the public interest of the city»).

However, the people of Carrara had an inkling about what was happening in Pietrasanta and, thinking that Michelangelo could be involved in such plots, they turned against him and went so far as to “besiege” him, that is, on the Avenza beach they prevented him loading the marble for Julius II’s tomb that was

BY ALESSANDRA SCAPPINI

MARBLE, WHERE ART MEETS TECHNOLOGY I

N

-

D

E

P

T

H

106 | Art

As part of the contemporary art scene, the launch of new technology has sped up research, fuelled and upgraded by incredibly sophisticated soft media that have replaced hard machines, heavy mechanical gears dating to the early industrial revolution that were typical of the socioeconomic world astride the 20th century. Technological applications are increasingly resorted to for art as well, thus changing the way we feel and make art, with interactive multimedia urging us to invent a new aesthetic value system, as we need to make a deliberate assumption that, at this time of transition and nomadism, one cannot overlook the ground where ethics challenges the digital technology, automation, ITC for manufacturing. The image of the artist intent on working with his hands to create and convey his personal poetics looks almost obsolete if we think of massproduced items that come from automated designs and industrial processes, ready

A

N

A

L

Y

S

to be catapulted into market economy.

Especially in 20th century art, art and machines seem to have been incessantly crossbred so that they raise questions and doubts, not least for the avant-garde that since the early 20th century has been interacting with media technology in a bid to encompass them all into the trends that have sometimes contradicted and rejected the idea of beauty, focussing on the occasionally clashing relationship between form and function, and caring for the implications and effects of machineaddiction. In fact, since the false belief that repetitive industrial processes miss the distinctiveness of handmade art shows no signs of dying, to such a point that the eternal value of personal invention and creativity, and therefore the halo of mystery,1 is so devalued that it stirs up that old, centuries-long argument between aesthetics and functionality, between art, craftsmanship and industry, the concept of a new artistic manifesto

I

S

Detail of Frappa by Francesca Pasquali, in the first stages of the process at the 5-axis NC shape cutter Photo Nicola Gnesi

Hans Arp and Erminio Cidonio at Henraux S.p.A.

108 | Art

Henry Moore on the Cervaiole quarry In Seravezza

has come to the fore, which, through a veritable rereading, insists on the fact that the artist’s imagination and poetics are not dampened or restrained by the technicalities of the medium. Actually the boundless, inexhaustible potentials of the medium can expand the artist’s mental horizons.

In the Sixties, incorporating electronic media into artistic experimentation in the first attempts at “humanising technology”, the signature of Korean artist Nam June Paik, looks like a form of innovative exploration and applied research, which experienced its most annihilating stage in the following decade, in the analytic and tautological debacle on art, the experiences of Minimal and Conceptual art substantiating the importance of that creative bent that tries to get rid of any subjective nuance, with the artist having his works executed by his assistants and him only taking care of designing them.2 If, in the user’s eyes, such process might prompt a reflection about reducing art to a mere concept and leaving out any manual skills, it also emphasises what it means to be an artist nowadays: someone intent on devising and implementing his own experiments vis-à-vis with the scientific and technological research he cannot do without, as a natural process he has to go

through in his career by combining his poetic concept and applied technology, with no separation or old-school rifts between the “emotional self” and the “technological self”, or actually benefiting from the overt and implied potentials of digital media and high tech, to create a work, from videos to performances, from photographs to installations, or otherwise engage in a quintessentially artistic process, while accurately gauging the relationship between “technological freedom and creative freedom” on a caseby-case basis. 3 Telematics and the technology that digitalises and automates the production process can be used not only to implement or inspire the artist’s creative process, but also – as already said – to speed up the artistic production process. In just a few years, examples of video art and digital photography have imbued the mood of media communication, paving the way to overspills and osmotic processes and to a wide range of experiments that crossbreed and challenge each other, thus multiplying their imbrications and hybridisations, while the “outcomes” of the so-called “traditional arts”, which used to be considered “art with a capital A”, such as sculpture and painting, now, in the broader field of the visual arts, are

a tiny casting of one of his sculptures – Reclining figure – to the carvers, “a plaster casting no more than twenty centimetres in size that had to be cut into a four metre statue”,6 he was met with a baffled look, but he also drove these men to take up a challenge, and, by making just a few minor changes in the execution of the project, to pave the way to a sort of experimentation focussed on new ways of creating.

Today the size of a sketch or a drawing is multiplied and zoom-scaled by the computer, which uses a scanner to rewrite the sculptural mass into a mathematical model straightaway, as a three-dimensional image. It is of course a virtual model but the artist can imagine and see the finished artwork straight in the marble block, its proportions adapted to the sculpture. Every mathematical function matches a given surface in space as a numerical transcription in binary numbers of the matching points of the model. So the area is marked to be cut out of the volume, its outlines carefully joining even the narrowest gaps together to leave out anything that is unneeded.

Some sculptures by Rabarama, nom de plume of Paola Epifani,7 installed

by Henraux in front of and inside Pisa International Airport in 2013 and 2014,

Mathematical model of a sculpture

by Rabarama

109 | Art

dressed up as installations and uniquely use cutting-edge tools, from the digital painting brush that was already in the Technology and IT Section of the Venice Biennale in 19864 to binary-based digital marble cutting, as one of the best-known companies in Italy, the Querceta-based Henraux S.p.A., is doing.

By now internationally known as a leading company in the processing of marble and in the production of monumental works that all over the world are testament to an unfailing laboriousness that masterly combines craftsmanship, art and design, right at the heart of the Apuan Alps, such company walks the line of a neverending legacy that – going back and forth in time – supports the vision of Erminio Cidonio, who was the company’s sole director between the 1950s and 1960s, to rediscover the weighty value of sculpting, in an attempt to cast the marble industry into the world of contemporary art, mass production, architecture, design, rather then the more traditional industries and then continue its experiments in the “Officina” lab5.

The sculptures just completed by Henraux S.p.A. were designed by the artists and mostly roughed out by digital machines then finished by hand. When in the mid-Fifties Henry Moore submitted

An anthropomorphic robotic arm working at a sculpture designed by Rabarama A sculpture by Rabarama in front of Galileo Galilei Airport in Pisa for “Volarearte 2013” Photo Veronica Gaido

110 | Art

Rabarama, Alis Grave Nil Photo Veronica Gaido

as well as other statues placed in some lidos in Forte dei Marmi and in Lucca, were actually made with such technique, which, by sending information safely through a translating software, can trigger or change the movement of an anthropomorphic robotic arm around the plate the marble block rests on. It might seem to contradict George S. Bolge, executive director of the Boca Raton Museum in the United States, who, in commenting Rabarama’s sculptures, emphasises his rejection of any machineinduced influence, though he addresses this dilemma head-on and values “humanistic qualities”, instead, as the “throbbing heart of life and experience”.8 In fact, the impressive sculptures that, as all-encompassing figures, convey the universality of human identity let out a glimpse of the “marks” of technological civilisation, veritable patterns that make up a tapestry of letters and ciphers engraved on the body and hinting at some hidden meaning.

The incorporation of digital and robotic media is an inescapable fact, and it interacts with the executive process as a working mode and as a working method.

Electronic work and handicraft meet, then, in the development of the work, leaving

aside any potential question about artistic creation as a primeval operation and as a technological application in the making process carried out by other makers: widely discussed questions that have become fairly commonplace now, vis-àvis the new directions of contemporary art. As we said, the electronic medium is connected to an anthropomorphic arm built by Fabrica Machinale s.r.l., a company based near Pisa,9 with a nominal power up to 30 Kw, that can rough out the block resting on the plate from the top or from the side at many different angles, cutting out even the tiniest portions, in the typical “removing” motion of traditional sculpture, as the first stage in a process that is eventually finished by hand. Later on, the craftsman steps in and finishes off the statue to improve the surface where the marble has yielded in. In truth, compared with the wire cutting technique, there is still a small protective layer here, as, when the block is roughed out, the robotic arm leaves one extra centimetre or a “rim” all around the footprint of the finished shape, to minimise the risk of producing an uneven or poor edge, and so that any mistake can be corrected against the mathematical model and small “adjustments” can be

pieces into “designer items”, a phrase that sounds like an oxymoron but that is quite apt if we look at the finish and gloss of Anastassiades’ works, the experimental design, the aesthetic taste that has no time for styling. Quite the opposite, it keeps art and design fairly well mixed together so that the aesthetic dimension remains somehow the key component, in the tidy sleekness of the minimal, plain shape, as if changing the semantics of the designer item and raising it up to the rank of artwork, beyond its nature as a functional item, which is additionally disproved when every single part is reproduced in the ever-changing “finish” of the marble surface, so that it may be never like the original model and will come close to the concepts of unrepeatability and uniqueness, even if influenced by an electromechanical interaction. Moreover, by producing a limited number of works, the artist will still add value to the uniqueness of his work though it has been “finished” by the crafting skills and with the clever help of the master craftsman who made a masterpiece out of a marble work, its elegant appearance secured by an attention to detail that adds a high aesthetic value.

From the designer item to the monumental

Michael Anastassiades, Miracle Chips made at Henraux S.p.A. Photo Hélène Binet

111 | Art

made to the original project.

Miracle Chips, a modular installation designed by Michael Anastassiades, is the result of a digital model that sends its instructions to the robotic arm. Its parts look like incredibly thin marble sheets, as if such material could be browsed through like a book, to such a point that it can be cut into a super-thin film that can even be folded, part of which is bent like a scroll or, as suggested by its ironic name, as a real chip. The distinctiveness of this work lies in the uniqueness of this elegant marble “film” that baffles the visitor, who is so impressed that he must wonder how such a hard material can produce such effects, as if it were suddenly pliable.

Its parts look as if they were crumbling, like windswept leaves gliding to the ground, or as disks and desks perfectly epitomising an industrial process that loves all things thin and curved, finished items based on the artist’s design, given to a machine that follows the digital instructions it receives from specific controls. In a perfect combination of art and machinery, industry and design, the boundaries between creation and execution blur and disappear into the interaction and complementarity of multiple dimensions that turn these

112 | Art

installation, Henraux has supplied the material for the impressive, outstanding monumental site-specific installation

by Mimmo Paladino10 in piazza Santa Croce, in Florence, unveiled for Biennale Florens 2012, which is just one further proof of a specific intention that goes beyond the industrial process, aimed to meet a substantial market demand that is met by worldwide exports.

As many as fifty marble blocks cut and sliced by automatic machines were laid in the shape of a giant cross with a myriad marks engraved by the artist to suggest an arcane, symbolic language that is the signature of all his works, from Christian iconography to alchemy, to esotericism, in a mishmash that incessantly interacts with the holy building in front, the Church of Santa Croce.

From this contrasts sprouts a constant comparison between past and present,

as if it made the vestiges of the past alive and ubiquitous in the syncretism of a melting pot and inspired people to look for mysterious secrets, for revealing cues, in an inner journey of self-improvement. A work, then, which may involve multiple relations, “from the marble that is the heritage Florence has built over the centuries to geometrical symbolisms”, as the artist points out,11 while his “marks” convey and signify the everyday dimension that vanishes in front of the spiritual and humanistic foundations of the place.

Work goes on in this direction at the Company, and every day Fondazione Henraux, as a step-by-step expression of its own will and of its longing to break new ground and be endlessly involved on many different fronts of exploration and innovation, within the scope of its heritage and daily experience.

NOTE 1 From the origins of photography and the age of Dadaism, a series-like process to make modular works has led to the loss of the aura, undermining the concept of unicum and leaving works to the aesthetics of repetition.

Cf. W. Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, (1936), Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1955, [trad. it. L’opera d’arte nell’epoca della sua traducibilità, Einaudi, Torino 1966].

2 Nam June Paik, who in 1965 made the first live film, Café Gogo, as a ready made video, is regarded as one of the pioneers of video art.

Sol Lewitt, who in 1967 wrote Paragraphs on Conceptual art published in Artforum.

3 F. Bernardelli, Dal film alla video arte, in G. Celant, (edited by), Vertigo. Il secolo di arte off media dal Futurismo al web, Bologna, Museo d’Arte Moderna, 6 May – 4 November 2007, Skira, Milano 2007, p. 290.

4 As wrote by Roy Ascott when presenting the Technology and IT Section of the Venice Biennale, in Arte, tecnologia e computer, in AA. VV., Arte e Biologia. Tecnologia e Informatica, XLII Esposizione Internazionale d’arte, La Biennale di Venezia, Edizioni La Biennale, Electa, Milano 1986, p. 33.

5 L. Conte, L’Henraux: i progetti, i protagonisti (1956–1972), in Henraux dal 1821: progetto e materiali per un museo d’impresa, complesso monumentale di San Micheletto, Lucca, 14-20 January 2006, Bandecchi & Vivaldi, Pontedera 6 Henry Moore in the words of V. D’Angiolo, in Henry Moore a Forte dei Marmi e in Versilia.

L’uomo, l’artista, exhibition catalogue (Forte dei Marmi, Lucca, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, 1998), Pisa 1998, p. 47.

7 L. Beatrice, Rabarama. Ortissa percorsi dorta 2010, Silvana Editoriale, Cinisello Balsamo (MI) 2010; L. Beatrice, G. Bolge, Firenze antico informe 2011, Vecchiato Art Galleries, Padova 2011; www.rabarama.com.

8 G. Bolge, in L. Beatrice, G. Bolge, op. cit., 2011 9 Gruppo Scienzia Machinale is headquartered in Navacchio, near Pisa, and specialises in the design and development of advanced robotic solutions through hardware and software technology for artistic applications.

10 Cf. E. Di Martino, Mimmo Paladino. Opera grafica 1974-2001), Art of this Century, New York, Paris 2001; B. Di Marino, M. Meneguzzo, A. La Porta (edited by), Lo sguardo espanso.

Cinema d’artista italiano 1912-2012, Silvana editoriale, Cinisello Balsamo (MI) 2012, as well as many catalogues and references; www. mimmopaladino.com.

11 M. Paladino, interview in La “croce in cui si cammina” e le esposizioni di Florens 2012, “Floraviva”, 3 novembre 2012

ulletin

BY ROSI FONTANA

1

CONVERSATION WITH THE THREE FINALISTS OF THE 3RD “HENRAUX FOUNDATION AWARD, IN MEMORY OF ERMINIO CIDONIO”

114 | Bulletin

DANIELE GUIDUGLI WITH MOBY DICK (VERTEBRA) The title of your sculpture is very evocative. How did the idea for your Moby Dick (vertebra) come about?

“The whale, the terrible Leviathan that reminds us of the extraordinary pages of Melville’s novel, was born of a chance meeting with a shipwrecked vertebra of the sea giant par excellence. This sight reminded me of a figure and an abstraction, an image and a poetics, combined into one. As it is a sculpture, the analogy between my Moby Dick and the white whale lies in the statuary marble, the epitome of white marble.

My thought, in its creative process, blended the sculpture with the material, so I imagined that the white statuary marble and Moby Dick were the same thing. As in Melville, man is always on the hunt for whiteness, for his own whiteness. We, as sculptors, despite the occasionally tragic taste of this “hunt”, look for the ‘whiter than white’, for the perfect snow-white.

It is the gold with which we want to shape our creatures, that precious material that enhances it like nothing else can do. My work is an installation, it is five vertebrae next to each other: on one hand, they depict that chance meeting that led to devise and create the work, and on the other hand they stand for that never-lost sense of man who survives himself by killing other men. There’s poetry in seeing what is left of what was alive, but there is also pain and outrage. Art is always loyal to itself, and I hope this work of mine will be too, it represents beauty but it also

challenges the viewer to reflect deeply on the world and on what the world is made of. Integrity or no integrity”.

How experienced are you in working with marble?

“I attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara, in this place marble is in the air you breathe, you live off marble, I daresay you ‘feed on’ marble.

I had professors such as Balocchi and Cremoni who advised me to take up marble sculpting straightaway, because they felt I had good manual skills. I feel definitely at ease with the carving stone par excellence, it’s a material I love and feel very close to”.

In choosing the three finalists, the Jury found a common thread, a sort of connection between the three finalist sculptures, pointing out that this year’s works have to do with a very relevant issue: the tragedy of immigration, human beings looking for a future that are unfailingly “stranded”. How do you feel about this meaning that the Jury came up with, do you feel your work reflects that?

“I think the Jury did an awesome job, it perfectly understood the tragedy of our days and I can see how that reading is reflected in my sculpture.

The gigantic skeleton of the whale recalls the proportions of the sea giant, and so the real extent of what I wish to portray. In such a dramatic scenario, I see the same analogy, from the skeleton – people adrift in society – we can guess the extent of this tragedy that is affecting all humans. I find it very reasonable and particularly important that the Jury felt the three works went in the same direction. Of course, a

Jury’s job is also to find connections and links among the projects, even more so for an Award that must certainly showcase the expressivity and creativity of contemporary artists, but above all find its own identity”.

So, could we say that, as far as your work is concerned, in this year’s Henraux Award the current news are the drivers of the art of writing its own chapter in sculpture?

“Of course, the title of my work makes it stand out. Moby Dick is a symbol, it is the image of a certain modern story, it comes from fiction but, as usual, it is the most stringent, absolute concepts of the portrayed worlds that are expressed in the arts”.

What did it mean for you, to work at Henraux?

“It was a unique experience, especially because I had never worked with the help of a robot. I realised how important technology applied to art can be. A technology that is at the cutting edge of the industry and that created great teamwork! Knowing the history of marble, I could say that technologically the robot is like the hands that have made history here, in this area, that history that is as unique as the white marble from its Apuan Alps”.

Did you expect to make it to the finals?

“No, it was totally unexpected. For a sculptor, it is a great honour to work with the white marble from Mount Altissimo, a material that is a form even before it is imagined. In this, I feel I have achieved an important goal”.

Daniele Guidugli working at his Moby Dick model Photo Nicola Gnesi

KIM THE RUYSSCHER WITH CANOTTO

116 | Bulletin

A monumental dinghy, a rubbery thing that “becomes flesh” in marble. What is the concept behind such an amazing work?

“There’s my story behind this idea, every one of my works reflects my past research. In my Canotto for the Henraux Award, I wanted to go back, once again, to a plastic thing, an industrial, often very cheap thing, and make the material stand out by contrast, a dinghy carved out of marble that stands for the beauty of nature. Stone has a very long life, it is the oldest carving material ever, hence the clash with the modern culture of plastics.

Another subject in my work are the opposites, juxtapositions: inflated/ deflated, heavy/light. This dichotomy is the most important thing for me. I like to imagine what the viewer will think when he sees my work, avowing the object yet disavowing the material.

That is the place where every work of mine begins, when the viewer asks himself all these questions: is this a dinghy? It’s broken, what happened? I like to give a key idea, an input, but it is the viewer who must come up with the story”.

Viewers will give their interpretation of the work, but we still have a distinctive, hieratic form, of almost solemn composure, here, but it is a “wreck”, it’s floppy, and this is a contrast too.

Why have you imagined this figure like that? It is a fracture, a thought, or just a shape?

“I always try to understand nature, to render it, here there’s a sort of scales,

there’s a game: inflated/deflated, gravity/non gravity, and that’s how this idea of these disproportionate scales came about, to lighten that marble boulder I used, which initially weighed in at about 27 tons. And going back to the public, to the viewers, I like to think that the people who will look at my work will no longer feel its “weight”. I imagine my Canotto being experienced by the viewer as a thought that connects the marble it is actually made of with the plastic it has always been experienced like. My work is somewhat minimalistic, it emphasises the opposites, it enhances a material to deny another, but the shape is the one we all know”.

How did it feel like working at Henraux for this third Award?

“Very interesting, because it was the first time I worked with robots, but above all with a team of experts in the processing of marble, a truly excellent cooperation if I think how many people were involved in the making of my work. What I have been most impressed by was the “changing of the guard” between me and the robot, it worked at night, I worked during the day, I had to understand his rhythms and it, mine”.

So, did you feel like a very modern Michelangelo?

“No, luckily not, because Michelangelo suffered too much in his lifetime”.

In choosing the finalists, the Jury found a common denominator. All three works have been associated with the current events, the humanitarian emergency that shows us makeshift boats every single day. Does your Canotto reflect this?

“Yes, of course. This dinghy began with some plastic bottles, every day we hear terrible news about people stranded at sea. I thought of inflatables, I wanted to send my own message, which is not political but poetical. I will not mind it if, in the stories that the viewers will want to write about my work, there’s this one as well. In creating my Canotto, a dinghy not a boat, I chose the great fragility of this object and its being “almost non-existent”, a subtlety that marble remarkably highlights”.

Your work too symbolises this tragic event, so once again art is connected with the world, with real-life experiences, is it right?

“Yes, of course, there is this connection in my work. I have dealt with many different subjects in my career, in one I followed the thread between the past and the future, between what fades away and what stays, in this sense I chose to work with marble precisely because it stands for the future, somehow for immortality. Stone lasts for a very long time, it is virtually eternal, this broken marble dinghy will preserve this idea, it will be like the page of a book in which a story has been written that can be read for years to come, long into the future. So, once again, I am going back to my idea of a story that is to be read in my works”.

It is a fact, art is immortal and particularly marble is a material that carries it into the future. To conclude, what is most important for you about your taking part in the Henraux Award?

“Having done a good job, a finished, well-made work, showing it to the public, hoping many people can see and enjoy it”.

Kim De Ruysscher working at his Canotto Photo Nicola Gnesi

118 | Bulletin

MAT CHIVERS, WITH NEWAVE Newave, a new wave made of opposites, a block of bi-coloured marble, black and white. At first, it had been called Polyphonic (what you want to see), what do we want to see in this work?

“I started to work at this sculpture with the title Polyphonic, a title that had a lot of meanings. At first, the work was an abstract idea, now in its finished form the title is Newave, literally a “broken wave”, the fragment of a wave.

I am deeply attracted to movement, to endless change, to natural phenomena.

Basically, the moment something happens in the natural world will never happen again, it is gone as soon as it occurs. When we look at a breaking wave, a wave that ends its life ashore, we never see the same thing, we can’t think of crystallising that moment. That’s it, my Newave is a little big game, it is an attempt at translating the perpetual motion of the sea into stone, even when it moves in different directions: the texture, the bulk, the fleeting moment. The work will last, instead, and it is a meeting of opposites, the relationship between something that will never happen again and an object that will last forever.

One of the subjects I am most fascinated by is the digital world. In this day and age, our society, which is so closely interconnected with the digital world, is leading us into an alienating perception of reality. In Newave, the black and white stripes stand for the digital world as well. What I did was take the physicality of a breaking wave and create the illusion of that shape.

When you look at the sculpture, you cannot see it straightaway, partly because you are seeing an isolated fragment of that shape”.

You made this sculpture in a highly specialist environment, which has a very long history under its belt, Henraux, which now has a great technological background. What did it mean for you, working in such a futureoriented environment?

“That’s a very interesting question.

For me, it felt like reaching a perfect symbiosis, especially because my work looks to the history of making.

I think the opportunity to work at Henraux has been quite important, not least because there I could ask a lot of questions and understand where the use of marble is going to go next.

Henraux is a very interesting company, the Foundation that promotes and is involved in the cultural scene with its projects perfectly fits in with the inescapable conversation about the future of sculpture, about the new trends”.

I can confirm that this is the real purpose of the Award.

“I saw how everyone at Henraux believes in the value of art, and how such value can make all the difference.

This is very important for me too, art can really make all the difference. In art, you can find what will happen, art is ahead of the game and is the ground every society is built upon”.

Art is the first to understand every society, it directs our thoughts to the future. But let’s talk about your sculpture, does the finished effect, so glossy and shiny, have a particular meaning?

“Yes, the surface of Newave is like a mirror, this effect I wanted my work to have is very important for me. When you look at something, if you can reflect yourself in it, then that object is “filled up” with you”.

So, we can see ourselves in the work?

“Exactly, you fill a gap, you create a connection with nature. In Newave, the reflection that is created in the work as soon as the viewer comes near is key. What is created through such reflection, such mirror, is the very concept of art, since art is the mirror of the times we are living in”.

In choosing the three finalist works, the Jury felt they had all taken inspiration from the current news. Especially in your work, they saw some opposites, black and white, north and south. Do you think this interpretation reflects what you have really conceived in Newave?

“That’s a very complicated question. I cannot see any “political” connection

in my work. For me, art, great art, is never outspoken, it is ambiguous, it can be anything, it could even be quite unintelligible. So, if I had to look at my work like this, I feel that would be going a bit too far. I think personal experience is very important, of course the viewer is free to read any story in my sculpture, but it’s difficult for me to impose any specific, pigeonholed interpretation. I don’t like set patterns and I have not built a specific pattern into this work. My work is a meeting of opposites. I am interested in what unites, not what divides. What I do is take two opposites and create a conversation between them, between two elements, in this case the black and white that Newave is made of. In addition, black and white have further meanings, they are a “digital” point, a dialogue, a cue, with many different meanings. Basically, my work is a celebration of ambiguity”.

To make this work, you lived in a place where people talk marble, live on marble, what was your experience like?

“My relationship with the places I work in always starts with a close connection with the area. When I arrived for the first time, in 2014, I spent a lot of time exploring these places, I walked and walked, I looked at the space, I wanted to immerse myself into this area and tune in the people who live there, and I fell in love with Italy. There is a special energy in the Apuan Alps, in Versilia.

As far as the Award is concerned, it has been a great experience, especially for my relationship with the other two finalists, it felt like crossing a river together, sharing a destination.

We travelled the same road, it was exciting”.

So, for you the making of your work and the Award itself have been an opportunity to share, not to compete, is that right?

“Honestly, I think we are all winners, ours has been a conversation, a partnership. What matters is having shared this beautiful experience. The Award is for everyone, it belongs to everyone. The works will be displayed, people will talk about them, this is all that matters”.

Mat Chivers supervising the rough-hewing of his Newave Photo Nicola Gnesi

2

THE VISIONAIRE

New York, New York, USA 500,000 square feet / 46,000 square meters Architects: Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects (interior design) Materials: Travertino Bianco, Travertino Noce

120 | Bulletin

The Visionaire is the most “eco-friendly” residential tower in Battery Park City.

Overlooking the Hudson and the Port of New York, it commands attention from the height of its 35 floors. In the lobby natural stone features prominently and it was Henraux who carefully sourced and fabricated all of the stonework. Grandness, enhanced with an open plan of generously scaled rooms, is balanced with the rich palette of travertines and limestones. Fine waving lines of cream, silver, gold and chestnut layer horizontally within open jointed panels, enriching each of four principal featu-

re walls – two defining the main entry hall.

The entry hall serves as the Visionaire’s primary public foyer. The building’s stone concierge desk is centrally important in greeting residents and guests at all hours.

A 12-foot long saltwater and living coral aquarium sits within one of the main travertine walls, animating the hall and the adjacent children’s playroom with aquatic life. An integrated bench invites all ages to sit near the tank and watch the fish, coral and crustacea playfully interact day and night. La Sirena (pronounced “see-raynah” – meaning siren or mermaid) is the

feature sculpture in the Visionaire lobby, completing the architectural expression of the main entry. Carved at Henraux SpA, by Renzo Maggi, from a single 2-ton block of Classico Travertine from Tivoli, Italy, Sirena shares both material and theme from many of Rome’s most famous and enjoyed public sculptures – Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers and Trevi Fountain – which are carved from the same cream-colored travertine and celebrate the enduring power and grace of water.

3

FIRST CITIZENS BANK HQ.

Columbia, South Carolina – USA Architect: Duda Paine Architects LLP

122 | Bulletin

Centrally located one block from the state capitol in downtown Columbia, this nine-story, 175.000 square-foot building is designed to honor the client’s wish for a timeless, prominent civic structure that completed its historic Main Street setting. The permanence and stature of a public building is expressed in the use of materials and careful detailing. The limestone cladding, highly articulated bronze-colored mullions, and lobby detailing that includes a major public stairway with bronze railings crafted by local artisans.

Responding to a mandate for “a modern building that looked as if it had

been there for a hundred years”, the design process necessarily involved the creation of surfaces that achieved the look of craftsmanship. The heft and depth of limestone blocks, for example, was attained with veneer articulated in varying panels and reveals, with column and cornice expressions.

Still other details, such as the bronze railings on the public stairway and sconces, were treated as ornamental details worthy of handcraftsmanship.

The 83.000 square feet of exterior wall consists of 18.000sf of glass and 65.000 sf of Golden Beach Limestone from Portugal. The limestone was fabricated by Henraux.

The project includes office spaces, bank headquarters and an underground parking on two levels with 400 spaces. The placement of parking underground was crucial to the civic function of the site. A major public garden plaza was created to fill the resulting foreground. Richly planted and accessible, the new space functions more as a city park than a corporate plaza.

Already a popular gathering spot for city workers, it also accommodates a variety of public and private events, from corporate functions to wedding receptions and local festivals. The park plaza was recently awarded a Columbia Choice Design Award.

Henraux, with this project, was the winner of the 2007 MIA (Marble Institute of America) Pinnacle Award of Excellence. They said “Your winning entry reflects your company’s high standards and serves the entire industry by showcasing the superior quality and beauty of natural stone!”

4

GRAND MOSQUE FOR SHEIKH ZAYED BIN SULTAN AL NAYHAN THE 2ND

Abu Dhabi, UAE Architect: Studio Spatium Arch. Carmellini – Magnoli Joint venture: Henraux – Fantini Mosaici – Mosart

124 | Bulletin

As a testament to the vision of its founder, Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque sits majestically at the entrance to Abu Dhabi City Island, distinctly visible from the three main bridges connecting the island to the main land, the Maqta, Mussafah and the Sheikh Zayed Bridge. The strategic geographical location of the Mosque is a symbolic expression of the emotional connection the Mosque has with all the

UAE citizens particularly because the burial place of the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, first President of the UAE, is located beside the mosque.

The Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque is well recognized by its pure color and every artistic design element was carefully considered and fits into the overall vision of the Mosque.

Henraux has supplied floors in White Lasa and colored marbles, more than

100 arches in White Lasa, a wall entirely cut in marble that gives the landscape the light feel of fine lace and the “Qibla wall” produced with next generation technology inserting gold mosaic.

The colors of the walls, columns and the carpet are harmonized together transforming the entire Mosque into an artistic masterpiece and a symphony of colors and shades.

5

PROJECT FOR THE NEW LUCE DI CARRARA SHOWROOM

Architects: Studio ARCHEA ASSOCIATI, Firenze Conversion of part of the building (ex Henraux work shop) into a commercial building/showroom Started February 2017 Ending July 2017

126 | Bulletin

«Luce di Carrara marks the birth of the philosophy of “Abitare il Marmo”, which now means using it and shaping it into purposeful forms that are essential for our homes: old and contemporary, two inseparable values for a design that embodies the aesthetics of such a unique an outstanding

material as the one that comes from our Apuan Alps. And it is through marble, which is at the centre of any design that wants to interact with tradition but through contemporary languages, that all of Luce’s objects are born». (Aldo Colonetti, HX Light catalogue)

Studio Archea Associati embraced such values when it redesigned the space that will be home to the first Luce di Carrara Showroom.

All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders.

It has not been possible, however, to securely identify the origin of every document reproduced. Anyone wishing to assert their rights in this matter is requested to contact the publisher.

Graphic Design and Layout Thetis Srl Via Oliveti 110 • 54100 Massa Printing completed in April 2017 Industrie Grafiche della Pacini Editore Srl Via A. Gherardesca • 56121 Ospedaletto • Pisa

ISSN 0542-7487