In the context of XNUMXth edition Ravenna Mosaic Biennial Review of Contemporary Mosaic, thanks to the precious contribution of the Cassa di Risparmio di Ravenna Foundation, the Monte di Bologna and Ravenna Foundation, Marcegaglia Carbon Steel, the TUE – Art Museum of the City of Ravenna, opens a wide-ranging exhibition on the relationship between sculpture and mosaic, with the intention of probing and documenting the birth, the evolution of this language and the different declinations of the concept of “ tessera” by the sculptors starting from the XNUMXs, a moment in which, after that Gino Severini renews the practice of mosaic as a function of architectural decoration, the plastic mosaic research of Lucio Fontana e Mirko Basaldella, one of the most brilliant Italian artists of the second half of the twentieth century.
It is difficult to think that, in those years, between the late thirties and early forties, Fontana e Mirko may have undertaken the experimentation of mosaic on sculpture by simply transposing Severini's reflections, Sironi and the others, to their art, without feeling the need to carry out a historical reflection, a research that would also provide them with an ancient reference model, a starting point that would justify experimenting with the mosaic by shifting it from the two-dimensional plane to the three dimensional.
As has been historically demonstrated in the catalog of the 2014 Tuscan exhibition at the Civic Museum of Montevarchi (Arezzo), to engage that singular creative "short circuit" at the basis of their mosaic creations were the Mesoamerican "primitive" examples (present in the exhibition), which they both saw at different times and places, also thanks to the growing interest in the art of ancient Latin America already existing in Italy in the 1933s and which will see prominent personalities involved in the census of the finds from that area present in our territory national, until the organization of the exhibition of ancient Latin America organized in Rome in XNUMX.
The path that combines sculpture with mosaic, after the examples of Fontana and Mirko between the Thirties and the Forties, is interrupted to reappear forcefully between the end of the Seventies and the Eighties, with some sporadic exceptions in the Fifties and Sixties.
If Fontana and Mirko are "the precursors", forerunners of the happy union between sculpture and mosaic, between the Sixties and Seventies, Zavagno and Licata are instead to be considered as the two addresses on which the research of the following decades unravels above all concerns the use of "non-traditional" materials, the first, and the use of mosaic tiles, stone or glass, in the contemporary, the second.
The warp of the exhibition runs along the plot of this double and different use of materials – traditional and non-traditional – documenting the different expressive temperatures of sculpture between the XNUMXth and XNUMXst centuries, iconic or aniconic, poetic or narrative, symbolic or conceptual, always in the specific conjugation with the art of mosaic which intensifies and is identified as a "specific genre" at the end of the seventies by Antonio Trotta, Athos Ongaro and the Transavanguard of Chia and Paladino; artists who, even in the following decades, will make mosaic sculpture a non-episodic research, above all thanks to the technical and technological innovations given by the new materials of synthetic origin, which have allowed the traditional limits of cement mortars to be overcome, making mosaic execution easier on three-dimensionality.
This recovery will not fail to impress "cultured" designers such as Mendini and Sottsass who will make some experimental forays into sculpture. From the second half of the XNUMXs to today, research and artistic production in this singular declination of sculpture have multiplied with different and singular results and at the same time trace the design of the multifaceted artistic research of the last part of the XNUMXth century. Some artists and mosaicists will occasionally perform three-dimensional works, others will alternate them in a balanced way with their two-dimensional production, still others will move towards sculpture more frequently, until it becomes increasingly exclusive.
From now on, also thanks to the creation of some works of international importance in Ravenna, such as the tomb of Rudolf Nureyev in Paris – today immovable, but present under construction through a virtual and multimedia installation – the sculpture and mosaic phenomenon will see an acceleration with artists from various backgrounds who will strongly characterize themselves as mosaic sculptors tout court, consolidating the perception that mosaic sculpture has now taken a path of absolute autonomy.
Between the XNUMXth and XNUMXst centuries, the mosaic language in sculpture evolves into different and metamorphic declinations of the concept of "tessera", also thanks to the solicitations of international research on the concepts of accumulation, parceled assemblage and "poetics of the object" fielded by the Nouveau French realism and then by the New British Sculpture, to then continue with elements of marked originality up to the current generations, who use it in an increasingly innovative and unexpected way.
Image (detail): Mimmo Paladino, Vanità, 1988, mosaic, h 48x43x8,5 cm, Ravenna City Art Museum, photo Giorgio Liverani
