The sculptural dimension of identity: a meeting between Silvia Celeste Calcagno and the Carlo Zauli Museum

In my life, I have seen many artists. I was born and grew up in the home of one of them and during my infancy and adolescence, I met all my father’s friends and colleagues, people that he invited home for lunch, dinner, or a snack with piadina or doughnuts. I met all the other artists that I encountered over the course of my career, people first circulating around, and. then right inside, my father’s old workshop that had been transformed into a museum. Throughout all this experience, I learned that there are two ways of being artists. Some look outside of themselves and become antennas sensitive to the social, anthropological and political context of the day, and so are then able to develop their own personal interpretation with distinctively unique aesthetic dimensions and forms. Others start from their own identity, excavating inside themselves, performing that quest that for millennia has placed us in the position of Diogenes with his lantern, incessantly trying to shed light on the dark depths within ourselves and the existential mysteries that accompany us from the first to the last day of our existence. A quest illuminated by flashes that shine briefly into the darkness and that can bring us face to face with a reflecting surface, showing us our own image, our double, outlining the mystery with more clarity and opening up the frontier to far wider territories, leading us far removed from a sterile solipsism.

For many years I have been observing Silvia Celeste Calcagno’s work with attention and admiration. Its roots are linked to different depths of significance. The artist develops so many themes of reflection as to become an important influence for someone like myself, engaged in thought on the different planes of intersection between ceramic materials and contemporary artistic expression, between technique and conceptual depth.

And I think that it is important to start from the dimension of ceramics, even though this aspect is not really the primary considerationto be borne in mind when discussing this artist.

At the time of writing this essay, in July 2018, Silvia Celeste Calcagno is without doubt a pivotal artist for anyone who observes, studies or works with ceramics in contemporary art. The central position of this role is due to two fundamental features hallmarking her work, features that have been an important part of her artistic approach for a number of years: an unusual and absolutely personal method of using technique, and the great clarity of the way in which she develops her artistic content, which transcends the dimension of genre that generally determines a technical vision of the arts.

In fact, as for other masters, Calcagno’s work spotlights her chosen materials, while rising to a far higher plane, becoming an art that requires no additional justification for her remarkable technical skills.

Calcagno’s work has something in common with a very small number of sculptors working withclay, namely her refined technique, that in any case will remain a landmark in the annals of ceramics history: Her technique is simply a container within which the work comes into existence, a technique with which the artist expresses her refined aesthetic universe. She utilizes the ceramic medium to bring us into this cave illuminated by the lantern of intuition which coincides with the quest for her own identity.

Therefore this rough material becomes a functional element of communication, even though at first sight it seems an antithesis, considering its fragility and the system of shaded tones that revolve around the concept of identity, helping to determine it. The material, its roughness and intrinsic hues, the elemental nature of  clay, and the disciplined use of colour, miraculously combine with the nuances of the artist’s identity and itsdual valence, which, as in a series of mirrors, brings us back to the gleams of light in our primordial cavern, part of our elemental mystery.

This incessant quest, and the artist’s tireless conceptual coherence, have led Silvia Celeste Calcagno to be a featured artist at this workshop, with this installation shown in the Carlo Zauli Museum’sexhibition halls and workshops: two experiences that the artist has interpreted using different tools, but with the unflagging conviction that is it important not to imitate oneself, while welcoming the interchange with Zauli’s work. Likewise, there are contrasts between the venues of the Museum and her own materials and iconography, utilizing various media with great expressive freedom, as in the case of her use of video.

This interaction leads to situations far removed from familiar, predictable ground, opening up new scenarios and throwing unexpected light ontoZauli’s oeuvre, something that Silvia Celeste always gives a central presence, with the delicacy of a visitor arriving in a room on tiptoe, but with the determination of an artist who wants to project this interaction into the realm of deep-rooted paths, that can be rediscovered – should this be necessary – by following the savage intuition that is often a guiding light for the understanding of contemporary art.

By way of example, in the 1960s hall, dominated by the large Vasi Bianchi (White vases) and the RuotaStrappata (torn wheels), Silvia decided to create a site specific work, Bless this house, an installation comprising many monitorsthat show the collapse of a number of tower blocks. The videos are coloured entirely red, a colour that is connected to Zauli’s white glaze, not immediately obvious but nonetheless an essential component of this finish that was developed in the 1960s and represents an important presence in the hall. In white glazes, the redcannot be seen because the selenium that creates the colour is just the memory of a temperature, that of majolica, far surpassed by the firing profile of stoneware. It remains just a non-uniform grey colour, creating the characteristic effect of the surfaces of Zauli’s works.

This chromatic transition, though hidden, can be discerned by means of a detailed examination. It leaves a trace of its passage, and it is this to which Calcagno creates an almost unconscious link, interweaving intuitive connections between works and artists that, though belonging to very different periods, apparently widely separated, are connected within that world of relations that represent the difference between a product and a work of art.

Matteo Zauli