ART IN THE CITY - STONE SEAT
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An exhibition of grey-stone benches in a square is a peculiar idea which actually creates a gap between the acknowledgement of the benches as such, and consequently the temptation to sit down and rest, and seeing them as sculptures, that is feeling frightened and looking at them from far away, as if we were in a museum. Sixteen Italian and foreign artists have gathered for these projects carried out by the craftsmen from Firenzuola, who for ages have been handing down the ability to work stone with chisel - today, though, also in a more "mechanised" way. This stone, more than any other, is characteristic of Tuscan cities. However, today the challenge consists in trying not to stop, in looking for ideas to renew an old tradition and to give the craftsmen new opportunities to produce objects which are not restricted to the mere repetition of known shapes.
So here is this project that aims to make sculpture closer to people, carrying out objects to use, where one can sit down and stop to reflect. This art becomes part of the city with no breaches and at the same time gives rise to renew the interest of the workers.
Benches reduced to the essential, like the strange poem of the work by Yasuda Kan: nearly a stone placed on the ground which evokes the primordial instinct to use as a seat what nature gives us. Or benches where function becomes the main motive of the project, like the seat by Giņ Pomodoro: extremely simple, as simple as the act of sitting down. Now smooth surfaces, to become nearly soft and to change stone into something else, like Viliano Tarabella has carried out; now rough ones marked by the blows of the chisel which leave deep signs in the seat by Jean Paul Philippe that with suffered dignity presents itself to the passer-by; now surfaces combined with other materials like in the case of Marcello Aitiani.
However, the best purposes which support the idea of this project are partly thwarted by the unfair prohibition to sit down on the benches and by the idea that all these objects at the end of the exhibition will be taken who knows where and perhaps will never have the chance to be what they have been conceived for: benches anyone can use.
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Firenze - Piazza S. Croce
29/04 - 7/05 / 2000
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Text by:
Gloria Refini |
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