MateriaMetamorphosis

Creativity Oggetti, an avant-garde place for art and design, is pleased to present MateriaMetamorphosis, a project curated by Susanna Maffini and Paola Stroppiana: fourteen authors of contemporary jewellery coming from 12 different countries were selected for their ability of combining refined poetic languages with the careful research of materials often brought beyond their limits thanks to daring experiments and new technologies.

The international artists involved are:
Raluca Buzura (Romania), Corrado De Meo (Italy), Clara Del Papa (Venezuela), Gésine Hackenberg  (Holland), Satomi Kawai (Japan), Anna Król (Poland), Seulgi Kwon (Korea), Jounghye Park (Korea), Daniella Saraya (Israel), Nicole Schuster (Germany), Rita Soto (Chile), Luca Tripaldi (Italy), Flóra Vági (Hungary), Snem Yildirim (Turkey).

The use of heterogeneous materials in the field of contemporary jewellery is somewhat a core aspect in this artistic craftsmanship and in the last few years has opened it to unprecedented research scenarios. New products and new formal solutions have marked the cultural change of the Postmodern Age: the preciousness is not solely conveyed by the intrinsic value but also by the idea and by the project itself. Every chosen material becomes a true protagonist for its specificity and above all for its potential: each artist’s imagination and intellectual legacy find formal solutions that underline an individual style and the new languages pursued. This also thanks to the unpredictable utilization of materials and new techniques, and even more so for the unforeseeable connections between them, real added value for the jewellery’s author, today comparable to a futuristic alchemist, heir of ancient knowledge and contemporarily supported by innovative technologies.
In the work of these selected authors it is possible to identify an ideal red thread that characterizes their research: the personal and unique relationship between the alchemist-artist and the materials used; material that can be mineral, vegetable, fabric, ‘precious’ or synthetic. It is simultaneously both the subject and the creative tool: the artist follows or breaks down the inside laws of rhythm and reproduces them in an completely new form through a process of experimentation, suspense and surprise. The rhythm is suggested by Nature itself: there is rhythm in a flower, in the micro-animal, in the moving body, in the mineral world: the ornament is understood in its functional relationship with the body and its collocation as object in space, both final expression of its becoming. Nature is not seen as a catalogue of forms to be reproduced, but is considered as a constant, unstable state of structural and metaphysical change, perhaps even poetic. Thus the jewel imitates nature’s expressions in its ‘transitional’ manifestations and explores the details, the spots, the debris, the lacerations, the materials that aggregate casually and wear out in time or due to chemical agents; but also by proposing synthetic materials that narrate a Post-Natural dimension, where the natural recreated in-lab is ‘truer than the truth’ and harmoniously coexists with genuinely raw materials. In MateriaMetamorphosis both Nature and the creative process are equally objects of the artist’s investigation, both expressing different and parallel concepts of metamorphosis. From this observation of matter and of its transformation process, but also from the thought and the emotional universe that lies beneath it and which inevitably evolves in parallel with the transforming materials, it is possible to reconstruct and identify new process dynamics through which new jewellery comes to life, often surprising their very creator for the polymorphism displayed, as the extraordinary exhibits do prove.

….The photographic project that accompanies the creations’ narrative (and constitutes in its own way a core element) was created ad hoc by Susanna Maffini and Federica Cioccoloni. These past few years Federica specialized, among other things, in the difficult art of restoring each jewel’s image on the two-dimensional surface of photography. In a clever way the choices made develop the exhibition’s theme with poetic coherence and each jewel relates by assonance or chromatic disagreement to a symbolically metamorphic material: marble…

You can download the catalog from the attachments