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Via Santa Marta 8
Via Santa Marta 8
A new artistic project makes its entrance in the 2023 edition of Fuorisalone, it is Piccoli Smalti, a brand designed by the talented architect and artist Giovanna Ferrero Ventimiglia who, on the strength of her constant search for original artistic expressions and her singular creative skills, has been able to combine Italian craftsmanship of the highest level with an ancient enameling technique, cloisonné, in the search for aesthetic effects of great elegance and femininity.
Piccoli Smalti is a collection of bas-reliefs that uses thin metal wires to delimit different parts of a design, thus creating cells filled with colored enamel.
Cloisonné is a decoration technique that has remained virtually unchanged over the centuries in which thin wires (filigrees) or strips of metal create alveoli (cloisons in French) within which enamel is poured. The origins of cloisonné are ancient: already known in ancient Egypt, it developed through several civilizations, reaching its peak in Byzantium in the 12th century and finding wide use in the 12th century in France and Italy as well.
Enameling is a technique that has been used for centuries in jewelry making and the decorative arts. It consists of melting powdered glass on a metal surface, usually copper, silver, bronze or brass, to create a durable, colorful coating. The process requires great skill and precision, as the glass must be applied in thin layers and fired at high temperatures to achieve the desired effect.
Each piece in the Piccoli Smalti collection, made in a single 10X10 square sheet format, tells a story and represents an original artistic vision. The unique and numbered enamels are populated with abstract designs in vivid colors that transform depending on the material on which they are presented.
After beginning to use wood and stone media, the artist began an experimentation that led her to work with marbles, her great passion, skins, brass, silver and, most recently, parchment and papyrus, a happy encounter during a recent research trip she made to Egypt.
The different materials create an interaction with color by modifying its tone. For her works Giovanna uses "cold" glazes that can be mixed together to achieve sophisticated hues. The alternation of opaque and transparent colors allows the geometric designs hand-engraved by the artist to emerge, almost a subtext that offers a second reading of the work.
Each glaze, made entirely by hand by a team of skilled artisans in Italy, highlights a variety of colors, from vibrant blues and greens to warm oranges and reds. Color scans that give off vibrancy, emotion and energy.
To date, Giovanna Ferrero Ventimiglia's abstract universe has garnered the attention of a select international audience at the Nomad exhibition in St Moritz in February 2023 and in a solo show hosted by Marta Sala Editions Gallery in rue Jacob, Paris in October 2022.
