2019 - Galleria Gagliardi, Magazzini del Sale Palazzo Pubblico
Piazza il Campo, 1 - Siena
Paolo Staccioli. Guerrieri, cavalli e centauri
curated by Antonio Natali e Ornella Casazza
Paolo Staccioli, ceramist-sculptor, after the exhibitions in the Florentine museums, could not but arrive at Palazzo Pubblico, in the most beautiful square there is, the center of Sienese life, once again in direct connection with the creators of our glorious past, with an extraordinary exhibition that offers the public works inspired by memory, dream, waiting.
In his art laboratory, in Scandicci, he moulds distant memories, the pleasures experienced on ancient texts, rediscovered and recreated with freedom and whiteness, he shapes his identity and his game is played out in a contradiction between the need to be modern and at the same time ancient, preserving forms and changing surfaces. He is able to joke with Eros and shows it to us as a winged child playing alone or with other divine children, shaped around the neck of a vase, to recall the vases produced in ancient times in Canosa di Puglia. Sometimes a winged cherub rides hugging the neck of a mighty ceramic or bronze horse and knows how to guide him to explore the ways of men. Then, in a fantastic and visionary vision of reality, Staccioli investigates his very personal relationship with the 'landscape', a landscape that is always the same, the one full of stories, set in other stories of winged horses, of light riders suspended in the void, even if fixed in a frame with wheels as the toy of our childhood or in movements by carousels or suspended in rocking where even men will go up to tell the world of desires and hopes. The artist is naturally able to gather in groups of seven, eight, ten, a hundred his silent and good-natured warriors and his enigmatic travelers who become icons of modernity and although ready for a journey back into memory do not depart: they await, perhaps, a group of other mysterious travelers with spheres, dressed in bright colors and in suits and ties, who hold a sphere on their shoulders, and as figures of the atlas, must support the world. Using with unlimited imagination those themes, long meditated and now significant in his repertoire, Staccioli is recognizable, without repetition: a sense of mystery envelops his almost acephalous characters, distancing them from any direct link with reality, creates a world that does not exist, but that is present in his mind when he meditates on memories of surreal and metaphysical taste.
Ornella Casazza
Magazzini del Sale, Palazzo Pubblico
Piazza il Campo, 1
Siena
Vernissage:
Saturday, February 9th, 2019
from 4 pm
Exhibition's timetable:
from February 10th to March 1st
Saturady and Sunday from 10 am to 6 pm
from March 2nd to April 23rd
everyday from 10 am to 6 pm
Organizad by
Comune di Siena
with the patronage of
Regione Toscana
Consiglio Regionale - Regione Toscana
main sponsor
De Paoli Edizioni d'Arte
in collaboration with
Galleria Gagliardi San Gimignano