Travel Material

Artists have a particularly visceral approach to material experimentation. George Beylerian witnessed this first hand during his travel to the 53rd Venice Biennale earlier this year. He reports from Venice on the spectacular forms he discovered by two artists, GUALTI and Federica Marangoni, whose passion for materials drives their respective bodies of work in very different ways.

GUALTI: Shoots of Light

In the heart of Dorsoduro is a white jewel box – hardly a 12’ x 12’ space, filled with the most delicate, attractive jewels of body ornaments. These jewels, however, are not made of gold or gemstones; they are actually made by the magical hands of GUALTI (Gualtiero Salbego) fashioned from nylon filament threads – resin acts as his “basic material”. The result is pure magic!

The ornaments are collar wraps, from small to extravagant, collar and wristbands that flutter into graceful and butterfly shapes, pleated and delicate in vibrant colors. Resin acts as his ‘base’ with nylon filament threads which reflect his childhood memories of pulling out roots from the soil as artforms. He creates ”shoots of Light” as extension of the body.

The sensibility in his fingers indicate childhood and adolescence work experience, when at 13, he started work in a laboratory of an artist/ ceramist in Capodimonte. At 18 he developed a passion for wearables, always manipulating shapes, curves and playing with “elasticity” as the extension of his craft. He explains that his work is not fashion, but art.
His “expressive needs” are mirrored in his work through form and color.
In other words GUALTI creates magic through his sense of color, shapes, curves, forms and the subtlety of it all! A true magician of shapes and colors!

FEDERICA MARANGONI: Places of Utopia

On November 9th, Venetian artist, designer and light sculptor Federica Marangoni’s installation “No More”, a wall of fractured sheets of glass and red neon tube bulbs, was inaugurated in Piazza della Scala for the public event “Plaza: Beyond the Limit 1989-2009, Milan’s open-air museum, Contemporary Art for the XX Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall”. It is an emotional form that reaches spectators facing this scenographic wall; an emotion that the artist herself lived in person and transcribed into a visual scenario. The transparency of the flat sheets of roughly cut and layered glass, the intense red of the writing in neon in the foreground, the veiling by translucent leafs and the heap of fragments at the foot of the wall, are all metaphorically strong elements.

We leave the searing red of Venice behind for New York, where Marangoni’s “The Tree of Life” recently made its extraordinary appearance on the streets of Manhattan at 211 East 70th Street, beneath the residence of collectors William and Ophelia Rudin. The 17- foot sculpture, like a huge vertical container, joins two steel slabs, in which has been cut out the form of an ascending tree, illuminated from within by a green neon light that suggests a verdant luxuriance, while also formally and metaphorically signaling the tree’s absence. The function of the sculpture’s artificial light, as portrayed to people passing by in the city, appears to depict man’s incessant work of emptying Nature.

A master of the luminous sign, author of the material and immaterial, of intense and emotional metaphors of daily life in a global society, affected by lacerating conflict, Federica Marangoni, has laid the traces, over the years, for a highly meaningful path in the history of art and design.

Image Bottom Right: Frederica Marangoni, Tree of Life, 2007, William and Ophelia Rudin Collection, New York, 2009. Two steel slabs boxed, Tree shape cut out, green neon shaped inside the box along the border of the empty tree. 196.85 x 74.01 x 43.307 in., Canadian stone base included. (Photo by Tony Vaccaro)