Revelation of Beauty
- Pier Giorgio De Pinto
- Revelation of Beauty
Revelation of Beauty (2022), installations with drawings, paintings and sculptures. Solo exhibition at MACT/CACT Museo e Centro d’Arte Contemporanea Ticino, Bellinzona, Switzerland.
Installation:
- 32 paintings, variable dimensions. Mixed media (Watercolor, Gouache, permanent pencil, pastel mounted on canvas frame).
- ‘A Blind Glass that is a Carafe that is a Blind Glass (Homage to Gertrude Stein)’, 2022. Laser cut corrugated cardboard Sculpture. Each Letter 50 (h.) x 12 (depth). Total length 12 linear metres. Variable dimensions.
You can download or navigate the catalogue here
This project stems from a series of trips I made between 2017 and 2018 in search of some important archives regarding the Venetian production of blown glass.
In 2017 I visited the Cini Foundation library and archives on the island of San Giorgio in Venice and subsequently the MET in New York in 2018.
I had access to a series of so-called “regesti” catalogs which depict the preparatory drawings of the glasses that were intended to produce and also many historical photos of glass objects that were produced. I photographed a lot of glass, especially vases, plates and bowls but also sculptures.
I completed this personal archive thanks also to the scientific collaboration of the expert in glass and ceramics Umberto Raucci of the Raucci/Santamaria Gallery and its huge library of catalogues on glass and ceramics.
The documentary support of the whole project owes its conceptual development to a text that was fundamental for me, namely “Tender Buttons” by Gertrude Stein.
I purchased the little book at the Serpertine Gallery in London and I was blown away.
The exercise that Stein does inside the book is one of observation, working on the subtraction of functionality; not only of the words within the short texts but trying to observe the object, very often in daily use, regardless of its functionality.
The very first short text “A Carafe that is a blind glass” gave rise to the personal exhibition I had at MACT/CACT Museo e Centro d’Arte Contemporanea Ticino in Switzerland.
Inside the exhibition it was in fact possible to observe an imposing sculpture that spread over three rooms for a total length of 12 meters and made by big letters.
I worked with Stein’s sentence by making it a “palindrome” text. As in Stein’s “dada” process within “Tender Buttons”, I also played by reversing the phrase, presenting it as “A BLIND GLASS THAT IS A CARAFE”. Entering the exhibition space, the end of the phrase “A BLIND GLASS” was read first, then in the second room “THAT IS” and finally in the fourth room “A CARAFE”. Going back in the path you could correctly read the sentence “A Carafe that is a blind glass”.
This work on the “beauty” of objects deprived of their functionality was evident having presented all the objects for what they are; the vases did not contain flowers or plants, the carafes were empty as well as the glasses or plates.
In the last room I exhibited some small canvases representing the famous “Ruba Rombic by Reuben Haley. Both the glass produced for the Consolidated Lamp & Glass Company and the ceramics produced for the Muncie Pottery Company.
With this series of almost unusable geometric objects, I took the idea of a non-functional but purely aesthetic object to the extreme, to be shown for its intrinsic beauty.
In the second room, a series of five landscape views seemed to interrupt this analysis of the object. In reality the landscapes were presented as my ongoing and in progress research on the ‘genius loci’ (spirit of the place). As my habit I always do research on the territories and what they produce underground. So think of the landscape not only for its beauty as a “panorama” or “veduta” but also think of it as a producer of those raw materials that the Human being uses for the production of glass and ceramics.
Glass is produced by fusion of some elements such as silicon oxide, with the addition of vitrifying agents such as boric and phosphoric anhydride. Ceramic is mainly obtained from clay powders, silica sand and iron oxides.
I then presented some glimpses of particular historical and naturalistic interest both in Ticino, Switzerland, and in Italy as well as the area surrounding Orta Lake in Piedmont, Italy.
To find out more:
Archivi Fondazione Giorgio Cini/Centro Studi del Vetro
The making of ‘Tender Buttons’ Gertrude Stein’s subjects, objects, and the illegible
Download exhibition catalogue Revelation of Beauty