Mutamenti

Articulated, curious, unusual, mysterious, and totemic forms accompany Gianna Albertin’s latest works.

We are faced with elaborate ceramics, nourished by graphic signs, pigments, and clay inserts that, in some cases, recall primordial, ancestral structures.

There is a strong reference to “mother earth,” starting from the clay itself, worked, engraved, impressed, and modeled, following an ancient and ritual practice. The taste for curved and sinuous lines, for rounded and enveloping shapes, prevails.

There is almost always a hole or an opening, celebrating a sort of escape route, a possibility of redemption, an “ascent” towards an abstract dimension, freed from all contingency.

Three-dimensional works display rugged, lively, and varied surfaces, with textures alternating between rough and smooth, concave and convex parts. The material chases moods that transform into plastic emotions and tactile sensations, which the magic of fire returns as stable volumes, capable of fascinating and questioning the gaze of every observer.

Remarkable is the production of two-dimensional ceramics that evoke tapestries with vaguely surreal, fantastic iconographic motifs, crossed by a recurring leitmotif: a black circle, repeated, measured, and rhythmic. Perhaps these are imprints that cannot be erased or clouds that inevitably accompany the flow of days and dreams, and more generally, of life itself.

There is a higher will to keep everything together so that nothing is broken or lost: strong strings bind, as in a book, the interrupted and recomposed sequences of these “flying carpets,” mobile and poetic universes dense with thickness, pauses, and voids.

To the “unfolded” tapestries, open in skillfully projecting and mosaic textures, contrasts the work Srotola, in which almost nothing is given to see: the title contains the invitation to act, to “unroll,” precisely, a closed form, bearing on the outer extension strange alphabets, similar to arcane and untranslatable cuneiform writings.

In reality, we are given “only” (so to speak) the faculty to imagine, and thus the greatest resource that can arise from a work of art.

The recent works of Gianna Albertin have the quality of making us active interpreters of a human, poetic, and artistic story, long meditated, sedimented, and skillfully rendered in profiles and figures in apparent change that never leave us indifferent.

Study, analysis, and constant practice are the basis of a careful and sensitive research within the great field of contemporary ceramics, which so much seduces and moves.

Hands, Earth, Fire

The recent works of Gianna Albertin, created with the wisdom of ceramic art, involve us in the challenge, which the artist continually renews, between matter and form. The hands that shape the clay face the obstacle of what is possible to do with it, and it is on this boundary that the inner tension is exercised, never failing the goal. With this disposition, “between what can be and what is possible,” even after the last form of the “alchemical” kiln, the object becomes subjective, does not yield to aesthetic reasons, but preserves the traces of the process. In the achieved point of balance, which is sometimes only fragile stability, the exposed nerve that moves space is revealed.

The tamed, bent, and perforated volumes of these works, like organs of a sensitive body, are inhabited by the trace of breath that expands or contracts, suggesting a nearby inside, the incarnation of a place. They are architectures that the intimate exteriority makes vibrate, perhaps capable of containing sky, earth, ash, fruit, and that do not rest statically, but are animated by the urgency of being things among things. Going beyond the sculptural and pictorial dimension, the trees, water, animal heads, carpets, created by Gianna, want to participate in space by shattering the identity of matter, on the border between real and plausible. To achieve this, the artist makes the surface the experiential tablet on which to gather the past skills of sign and color. Using the palette, where yellows and blues chase each other like the edges of a Tiepolo sky, the reddish-oranges, perhaps of symbolist inspiration, phrase on the opacity of the slip, she prepares the forms for the encounter with the light that makes them worldly. The carpets in particular, for the quality of the interventions of engraving, writing, imprint, pigment, propose themselves as a general glossary of the author’s production.

Like a shed skin during molting or a thick tattooed epidermis, they invite the gaze to follow the grooves, the planes, the stories, to trace the trajectories of intermittent spots, the black and white notches that mimic holes or scotomas of a blind spot of the eye, evoking the darkness from which, always, the work comes. The artist sees without seeing, sees through making and, with her hands, illuminates, makes way, tries to guide the completion. Then, perhaps, through these objects, following the traces that Gianna Albertin offers us, it will be possible to cross appearances towards new “dimensions,” realizing within us a change, as the title of the exhibition seems to hope.