CERAMIC AS EXPRESSIVE ART:
5 ARTISTS AT TECNARGILLA - Rimini
1-5 Ottobre 2002

Direttore Artistico:
Stefano Gagliardi

Coordinatore:
Luca Baldelli

Artisti in permanenza presso
Galleria Gagliardi
San Gimignano (Siena)
Taormina (Messina)

Luca Baldelli
Federico Bonaldi
Monica Borca
Daniela Chinellato
Armanda Verderame

When I am in the company of Federico, as I gaze at his works with a sense of enchantment and wonder, I often have the feeling that I am in the presence of an ancient spirit, one of those rare souls that have been sent back to dwell among us once again. Federico is a solitary man. His moods are unpredictable and he is sometimes quarrelsome. He would have a lot of things to tell you, but if he can he avoids speaking. He has an aversion to questions, like anyone who has experienced too often the tedium and insignificance of the responses. He has lived many lives and knows that he must die once again, perhaps with enormous suffering and unboundedmelancholy. He has travelled a great deal and experienced cultures that are different from our own. In him the wisdom of the shaman lives side by side with the naivety and the irreverent curiosity of a child. Now he travels very little. He does not enjoy being amongst people, but prefers to work. Every day he spends his usual ten hours immersed in his work in a small and chaotic atelier crammed with ceramic creations that each year he is more and more reluctant to part with. The radio drones continuously and keeps him company while he reads, draws on blank sheets of paper or works clay. There are scores of drawings, some of which spill over onto the floor, a tumultuous and humoral testimony to a quiet and solitary spirit. There are blank sheets relating days of doubt and hope through a continuous exercise of memory; pages filled with rapid sketches; implausible written texts like genuine labyrinths of existential malaise. Without precise deadlines (which he hates), Federico sorts through his drawings, transforms them into ceramic elements and assembles and recombines them into autonomous works. His sculptures are often a learned and never random combination of countless stylised images – symbolic, fable-like and erudite. The references to Zen practices and Buddhist, Taoist, Tibetan, Jewish and Christian thought are in many cases explicit. Signs and symbols intertwine in an inevitable interdependence of graphic design and substance: good and evil, life and death, love and hate, joy and suffering become inseparable and intrinsic dualisms in human becoming. In other cases, the images tend towards esoteric representations testifying to truths that can only be known through the practice of silence and meditation. They express fleeting hope of ultimate salvation. A frequent motif in his work is a face with a finger covering the mouth, a symbolic gesture of Sufi origin that represents truth in silence and the vanity of works and excessive knowledge. Although Bonaldi does not like to talk about himself, many of his works are fragmented images from his existence and his memory as a man gazing at everyday objects and daily life. In this cycle of works, the world of sentiment and emotions takes material form in the magic intertwining of a myriad of everyday objects and a poetic representation of people and situations that are dear to him. With nostalgia and affection he remembers his mother, his grandmother, his lost games, small objects with the magic appeal of water. He remembers love, letters left unwritten. He remembers when everything was simpler and a wish was sufficient unto itself for the simple reason that it was expressed.
Stefano Gagliardi