Meeting with the artist: guest Daniele Strada
As part of the training of the last course, the third, the “Meeting with the artist” took place: an event which sees the participation of a personality from the art world, guest for a week at the Scuola Mosaicisti del Friuli.
This year Daniele Strada was invited, mosaicist, teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts of Ravenna, an artist capable of focusing on aspects of the present and of everyday life to interpret them through solutions capable of enhancing the variety of materials and compositional choices typical of the mosaic .
An opportunity awaited by the students, the “Meeting with the artist” involves a direct discussion and joint work where the guest brings his skills, his expressive form, his vision of art. The students are not only called upon to understand and translate creative projects, but to follow their conception and development, developing their own answers to questions and suggestions that arose during the time spent with the artist.
Starting from a series of his mosaic works which had as their subject contemporary bookcases described from different perspectives, Daniele Strada wanted to propose to his students the reflection that led him to focus on this particular place, which collects knowledge through concrete and lasting objects, books, and which shows off to affirm one’s social role, level of culture, interests and affections. The sharing of the artist’s thoughts was followed by the planning and execution phase: each student was asked to imagine and create their own library, current, immersed in reality, without any preclusion in the choice of materials, points of view, stories that they would have told.
A sequence of mosaics was therefore born that describe many different “walls of books”, where these, although protagonists, are accompanied by vases with plants, computers, frames and lamps, where there are folders, magazines and newspapers, bound historical tomes and paperbacks grouped by color, boxes, watches, candles, photographs. These shots where the books are aligned, stacked, inserted, positioned in precarious balances, preponderant but not alone on the scene, allow the passage of time to shine through, day after day in the accumulation of things. They are the mirror of the owner’s passions, of the culture of the place, of the fashions and tastes of the period. They contain expectations and memories, reveal treasures and curiosities and preserve a fragment of universal knowledge.
Strada’s proposal also fascinated the students for its more technical implications: the materials to be included in the rendering of the bookcases, the dimensions and shapes of the tiles, the variation of the depth and relief, the treatment of the surfaces, the contamination with other art forms.
The workshop experience with the artist Daniele Strada offered the students and the Scuola Mosaicisti del Friuli another opportunity to delve deeper into mosaic as a language of contemporaneity. The “bookcases”, mosaic works that are the result of this comparison, represent a look at today’s man, on his living in domestic spaces, on his relationship with culture and knowledge, taken together they constitute a sociological analysis carried out with the sensitivity of art and the expressive power of mosaic.
March 21, 2024
