Nanni Valentini
Il vaso cretese, 1983
vitrified terracotta, h 120 cm
Valentini once declared himself interested in creating a "three-dimensional painting": relief painting or painted sculpture. This is why the artist chose ceramic, because with it you can manipulate the earth, create in three dimensions, but also paint, colour, enamel, scratch and engrave. For much of his career Valentini oscillated between painting and ceramics, then left the latter to be reconquered from the Seventies onwards. The work in the collection is not just a sculpture, it is not simply a vase that bears traces of the process of its manual creation. The spiral shape of the material that grows on itself also generated the fragment that is now applied to the wall and which opens a new relationship between the work and space. The abstract bas-relief that also stands out on the wall poses it the same way. Thus the work becomes a relationship and visual memory of the creative gesture.
from: Fondazione Arnaldo Pomodoro. La Collezione permanente, exhibition catalogue, edited by G. Verzotti, A. Vettese, Milano, Skira, 2007, p. 179.
