Materia Prima
face/vase project room
(works from Albisola Artists in Residence)
Palazzo Podestarile
Montelupo Fiorentino/IT
2016

face/vase project room, 2015-2016 | glazed earthenware, synthetic ropes, monotype on paper, ink-jet print on paper, mixed media, paint, wood, bones, objet trouvé, photographs, books, postcards, brochures, glass, video loop 11’20”, poster from news-stand, bicycle, surfboards | cm 293 x 510 x 530

detail from | face/vase project room (vase), 2015-2016

detail from | face/vase project room (plate), 2015-2016

detail from | face/vase project room (showcase table), 2015/2016

detail from | face/vase project room (riot), 2015-2016

detail from | face/vase project room (bones/surf), 2015-2016

detail from | face/vase project room, 2015-2016

detail from | face/vase project room (plate), 2015-2016

Brilliant excuse
Luca Bochicchio

Ceramics is a brilliant excuse for us.
To say it better: ceramics is nowadays a fantastic route, a way linking us to the world, allowing artists from Faenza to reach Albisola, like many others before came from all around Italy and Europe (though, how many of them came from Faenza?).
Nero for Albisola Artists in Residence: his life is his art and art, like life, is what happens during one month of hard and intense work in Albisola.
February 2015: a cold raining month, the coast is windswept and beaten by waves.
Nero joined us with his camper van, with his small Texas Coyote, with his bicycle, his camera, his surfboards. Nero at potters and tourist guides’ houses, in public libraries and museums, at the engraver’s studio with pencil and lead.
Silently along with Arturo Martini, at Asger Jorn’s, on the sea promenade with Leoncillo and Fontana.
Nero at the artisan’s studio by night (engraving plates, shaking vases, discussing about Albisola and Faenza).
Nero embracing Giovanni Poggi: the potter. Nero staring at him while he is making a vase: Giovanni Poggi who have worked for sixty years with Asger, Lucio, Agenore, Wifredo … and many other great men: too important to be merely named here.
The project too is just an excuse: FACE/VASE.
It is an excuse to shape the clay, subverting paradigms such as VASE and MASK.
Collecting from the beach bones of whales and cuttlefish, plastic waste, dolphin vertebrae and woods, in order to test them on the vase, on the face. Animals, beasts, rabbits, cyborg. Merely faces, just vases and punched plates. Let it be.
The PROJECT ROOM is set like a collection of finds, traces, sacred objects and rites in one anthropological museums. The nomad gathered fragments of epic existences: bones coming from the sea, one katana unsheathed within the restaurant, never ending talks that get to the point, up to the firing of a gun (at dinner).
Nero’s existence must go through, subvert, even disturb if necessary the apparent quiet living; eventually recording and giving a simple and natural form to the complex economy of art system.

Partner: G. Mazzotti 1903, Ceramiche San Giorgio, Studio Ernan, Stamperia del Bostrico, Laboratorio di Marco Tortarolo, Scuola di Ceramica, Museo Diffuso Albisola, Marco Poggiali.