Homage to Nane Zavagno: mosaicist, painter and sculptor
With great sadness the Scuola Mosaicisti del Friuli learned the news of the passing of Nane Zavagno, a multifaceted artist, capable of opening up new expressive ways for mosaic towards the contemporary.
Born in 1932 in San Giorgio della Richinvelda, attracted by art and plastic modelling, he attended the Scuola Mosaicisti del Friuli first as a student and then as a teacher. For him, the mosaic represents contact with the material, attention to light, compositional rigor, elements which he later transfers into other expressive forms such as painting and sculpture.
At the end of the 1960s he occupied the chair of plastic arts at the Sello art institute in Udine, taking over from Dino Basaldella. He always combines teaching with intense creative research which leads him to have contacts with international figures, capable of eliciting suggestions and interests from him which he transfers into a multifaceted artistic activity which intertwines and decants, developing concepts of space, form and matter. : thus drawing and painting explore the forms that sculpture makes three-dimensional, with compositional solutions that find their foundation in the mosaic.
Master mosaicist capable, among the first, of intercepting the innovations introduced to the Scuola Mosaicisti del Friuli by artists such as Mario Deluigi in the 1950s, he abandons a descriptive approach, to uniform weaving, to favor the direct technique, enhancing the intrinsic characteristics of the materials, in particularly the natural ones, thinking about the synthesis of colors and the chiaroscuro effects of a surface that became speaking, no longer flat and uniform, but animated by reliefs and irregular tiles.
In this he was an innovator, a mosaicist appreciated for his rose windows and large panels decorating public buildings in the provinces of Udine and Pordenone, from the municipal buildings of San Giorgio della Richinvelda and Mereto di Tomba, to high schools such as the wall of the Institute Technician A. Malignani in Udine, then the War Memorial of Pozzo in San Giorgio della Richinvelda, the Auditorium of San Vito al Tagliamento, the sports hall La Favorita of Spilimbergo, the two large panels in the canteen of the University of Udine, in the Rizzi area, from the late Nineties. Works created in collaboration with the Scuola Mosaicisti del Friuli, always with a clear and determined vision of the result to be obtained.
In 2023, the Scuola Mosaicisti del Friuli hosted a section of the exhibition Nane Zavagno. L’arte, una vita, in the exhibition gallery, curated by Angelo Bertani. Of the complex and large anthology, the rooms of the School hosted his most recent mosaic production which, between geometric motifs and essential chromatic choices, brought out the interest in the basic, founding element of the mosaic, the tessera, whose origin is for the Friulian territory, river pebbles. In this, the works of Nane Zavagno represent an essential example for the master mosaicists who trained after him at the Scuola Mosaicisti del Friuli: in the 1950s he courageously claimed the expressive autonomy of the mosaic as an art form and with it the individuality of the master mosaicist, not a simple executor of drawings and paintings signed by other artists, but a creative personality who communicates with a language that has its own rules and characteristics: a mosaicist as an all-round artist as he was, in fact, himself and therefore a personality still alive in the Scuola Mosaicisti del Friuli.
In this painful moment, the Scuola Mosaicisti del Friuli is close to the family of the master mosaicist Nane Zavagno, who passed away on Saturday 11 January 2025 at the age of 92.
January 13, 2025
