Material modulations
Contemporary mosaics of the CaCO3 group
by Paolo Bolpagni | Variazioni Parametriche
To encounter the artistic production of the CaCO3 group – or collective, as the term used to be – made up of Giuseppe Donnaloia from Puglia, Âniko Ferreira da Silva (from Ravenna, though of Brazilian origin) and the Greek Pavlos Mavromatidis, is to experience wonder, at least it was so for me. What surprises first of all, in the initial impact with the three artists’ work, is the material consistency, the distinct perception of an extremely refined manual ability (though never flaunted as an end in itself) and the awareness of being before remarkable, iridescent, enigmatic mosaic surfaces.
A technique coming from such distant times and so strongly characterized – that it is inevitably associated, in the collective imagination, with the tradition of opus vermiculatum of ancient Rome, with the great Byzantine works at Ravenna, with Medieval cycles – in the hands of CaCO3 becomes something new, modern, communicative. I am aware that the observation is self-evident and almost repetitive, but it is an essential access key that sets off a “thought mechanism” creating unforeseen perceptive and mental short circuits.
Above all it should be said that creating mosaics, today, is in itself a significant, as well as courageous choice: it means declaring an idea of art inextricably linked with technique, with making, according to which form and matter, image and volume, conceptuality and objective presence cannot split apart and go separate ways, but have to stay connected, in contrast with today’s medial derivations which sometimes see the work transformed into software or a computer virus, or else into a purely virtual space or visual but without dimensions.
It should also be remembered that the work of Donnaloia, Ferreira da Silva and Mavromatidis originated in Ravenna, and has its roots in a very precise location.
Clearly I am not referring to San Vitale and Sant’Apollinare, but to that extraordinary initiative which, towards the middle of the 1950s, with the “blessing” and the advice of Giulio Carlo Argan and of Palma Bucarelli, saw Giuseppe Bovini, lecturer in Christian archaeology at Bologna University and promoter of courses on Byzantine art in Ravenna, commission famous contemporary painters (Capogrossi, Afro, Santomaso, Corpora, Moreni, Vedova, Birolli, Cagli, Campigli, Cassinari, Deluigi, Gentilini, Guttuso, Mirko, Paulucci, Saetti, Reggiani, Chagall, Sandquist and Mathieu) to realize preparatory cartoons for the creation of “modern mosaics” by master mosaicists , with the aim of showing the actuality and the expressive potential in the light of the most up to date artistic research. Those works would then be presented in an exhibition, opening on 7th June 1959 and was to form the first nucleus of a collection which, since 1984, has been in permanent exhibition in the court yard of the Loggetta Lombardesca.
This historical premise, is, above all, for the benefit of those who are not from Ravenna, and serves to set the very singular research of CaCO3 into a context and to highlight its originality. In fact, if in that experiment of the 1950s painters had designed the cartoons and the master craftsmen had then translated them into mosaic, today we witness the work of talented young artists – one remembers the important exhibition held in 2014 at the MAR “Eccentrico Musivo: Young Artists and Mosaic” – who combine the perfect grasp of the mosaic technique with that quid of originality and desire for expression (we would say in German, Kunstwollen) which takes us into the context of the aesthetic-communicative dimension.
The works of CaCO3 (which, we have not yet explained, is the chemical formula for calcium carbonate, or the material of which – either entirely or partly – a great variety of stone or limestone is composed) appear as moving and undulating surfaces, in which the tesserae are of glass, sometimes coloured, or enclosing gold leaf, else in marble, usually Biancone.
These small pieces which Donnaloia, Ferreira da Silva e Mavromatidis obtain manually – in the first case starting from a sheet of glass (which non-expert hands would shatter immediately) obtaining small “strips” with the use of special pincers, in the second by using a small hammer and a kind of an anvil – are arranged and “stuck” one by one into a layer of wet cement mortar, mixed with oxide to obtain different chromatic shades. This base, laid on an aluminium honeycomb panel within a heat-treated iron framework, not infrequently appears with its chromatic component even in the finished work, often significantly influencing the perception of the work (sometimes it can be seen between the pieces and it is a precise choice of the artists). The tesserae may be arranged in many different ways and can themselves be different from each other; perhaps in the case of the glass, slightly undulating. Their varied appearance, due to the changes in the inclination with which they are set into the cement support, is able to generate numerous effects, of movement, of rotation, of modularity, of pulsation; for this reason CaCO3 mosaics often have optical values, experimenting unsuspected kinetic dimensions and an idea of dynamism thanks to particular compositional and technical procedures.
In the end, the medium used by Âniko, Giuseppe and Pavlos is that of light, which creates infinite suggestions and ways that their mosaics can appear; in each is enclosed an authentic universe of perceptible possibilities: one only needs to observe one of the CaCO3 works from different viewpoints to become aware of the enormous variety of colours, forms, movements, of effects created in the vision (and brain) of the spectator. So many as to ask oneself what the objective characteristics of the work are and if they can really be defined. But such reasoning would take us far, perhaps too far into interesting meditations, but which might risk our losing the enjoyment of the CaCO3 mosaics, whose mere material and tactile physicality, is itself magic and a source of continuous revelations, discoveries and wonder.
