ART AND WINE

Eroi di luce is a head amputated by dream containing a head swathed like a mummy: the artist’s cruel yet sincere vision. “I don’t think of the observer”, says Mitoraj, “I express myself through fragments, because the unseen part is much more important”. His statue remains a luminous fragment, set apart from the cellar. Framing it is the sky, which at times seems to “light up” the white of the marble, and the green hilly outline of Ca’ del Bosco.

Igor Mitoraj was born in Oaderan, Germany; his mother was German and his father an officer in the Foreign Legion. He sur- vived the bombing of Dresden at the end of the war in 1945. He grew up in Wroclaw, studying under Tadeusz Kantor, then moved to Paris, taking courses at the Beaux-Arts, and later to Mexico, where he studied Aztec art. He spent his time between Montmartre, Soho and Greece, source of his most evident inspiration. He passes away on 2014.

This sculpture “Elogio dell’ombra”, located in Ca’ del Bosco’s little lake, seems to serve as framework for predominating nature but at the same time, in a play of watery reflections, interlaces with the leaves and geometrically changes one’s view of the place. A feeling of lightness contrasts with the solidity of te sculture.

Bruno Romeda lives and works in France and New York as well as in his birthplace, Brescia. His works have been exhibited in the world’s top art galleries. Circles, squares and triangles are the favorite themes of a simple, almost primordial, repertory rendered in narrow strips of bronze of varying thickness. The lines they create seem to take inspiration from the Val Camonica rock engravings. The artist began to work “on site” in the early 1950s in Antibes, in contact with great geniuses like Picasso, and continued in the sixties in America when minimalism was at its height. His spare and lightweight works, made up of full and empty spaces, are designed to blend in with the landscape and natural surroundings.

The work’s positioning “Il peso del tempo sospeso” at the entrance to the cellar is striking and disorienting. A life-size rhinoceros hanging from the ceiling, a witty hyperrealist joke. The animal symbolizes vitality and energy yet here it is harnessed and suspended, as if to make us think about the meaning of the still life in art, yet in the end shocking us and leaving an intense and violent impression.

Stefano Bombardieri was born in Brescia, son of sculptor from whom he first learned about artistic techniques and materials. But his expressiveness was nurtured by his youthful experiences working at the Gardaland amusement park, where he learned the secrets of constructing whales, rhinoceros and imaginary or prehistoric sea monsters. Everything needed for spectacular fun, encouraging him to become a great jester in art. He amazes and amuses us but at the same time makes us think about seemingly banal aspects of life, teasing our rationality. Hence the surprising placement in the Ca’ del Bosco cellar, midway between deliberate symbolism and subtly playful intent.

In 2009, Maurizio Zanella asked the Cracking Art group to create an animal that would blend perfectly into the setting of vineyards and woodlands on his Erbusco estate. Thus was born the idea of the wolf, in this case a vigilant but benevolent guard wolf. The drawing traced the outline of an almost priest-like wolf, softened by a fleeting, ironic smile. Sketches were turned into physical forms to create Blue Guardian, in a blue that deliberately “breaks” with Ca’ del Bosco’s colours.

Cracking Art, the art group founded in 1993, brings together six artists (Nucara, Veronese, Angi, Rizzetti, Kicco and Sweetlove) who each express themselves in strong individual languages. The process of catalytic cracking takes oil, the oldest natural material in the universe, and transforms it from a natural substance into an artificial one to make it a sculptable, recyclable material. Cracking Art creates shapes that mimic nature through animals communicating an “indestructible optimism”, as critic Piero Adorno called it.

Egg Concept is made with more than 6,000 eggshells. The central element of Egg Concept is a perfect egg on an articulated base, which forms an integral part of the work itself. From the aesthetic point of view, Egg Concept fits into the Arte Povera tradition for its use of low-cost, recycled, everyday materials and into Conceptual Art as it is a meditation on the concept of art and art’s role.

Spirito Costa is from Brazil, which has given him a heightened sensitivity to all things ecological. He has experienced the trauma of the Amazionian forest at first hand and, to encourange reflection onwhat is a kay issue for the continued existence of the entire planet, he has created “Egg Concept”. Its message is universally accessible thanks to the widely dominant symbolism of the egg, shared over the centuries by almost every culture.

Over the years, the artists have followed a line of inquiry that focuses attention on pieces of nature, a sort of imaginary sample swatch where a magnifying glass enlarges that which the earth can contain, a sort of memory of man’s passing. This clump of earth makes us think about the esthetic aspect of enlarging a piece of soil, with little flowers, lost fragments of human activity, with color and shape their only remaining properties, books lost and found that tell of a temporary knowledge, grass, rocks: an imaginary world rich with sensations. In the center of this microcosm is a bottle, which enshrines all of these sensations in itself.

Bertozzi & Casoni was founded in Imola in 1980, by Giampaolo Bertozzi (1957) and Stefano Dal Monte Casoni (1961). Even in the first years of their artistic development, their interest gravitated towards a dialogue with the great artistic tradition, cultivating an inherent proclivity for experimentation in the field of sculpture and identifying ceramics as a material that makes painted sculpture possible. Among the highlights of past exhibits: Tate Liverpool (2004), Sperone Westwater, New York (2005, 2010, 2015), Ca’ Pesaro, Venice (2007), Castello Sforzesco, Milan (2008), Venice Biennale (2009), Venice Biennale (2011), All Visual Arts, London (2012), Museum Beelden aan Zee, the Hague, and Beck & Eggeling, Düsseldorf (2013), Palazzo Te, Mantua (2014), Expo, Milan and Mambo, Bologna (2015), GAM, Palermo (2016), Museo di Palazzo Poggi, Bologna, and the Pinacoteca Civica, Ascoli Piceno (2017).

The concept of Sound of Marble is based on the interaction between marble, sound and light. The work investigates the ancestral qualities of stone related to the innovative challenge of making very thin walls that are both curved and self-supporting. Once inside the artwork, the artist's idea is to amplify the sounds of nature, such as those of wind and birds, through the shape and thickness given to the marble itself. In addition, the type of marble chosen, Estremoz, is able to take on different colors through the veins in the stone that change their appearance with the rain.

Tsuyoshi Tane is a Japanese architect working in Paris. He graduated from Hokkaido Tokai University in 2002 and has gained professional experience in London, Denmark and Japan. Tsuyoshi Tane is considered one of the exponents of the new generation of emerging architects who create architecture guided by the memory of a place, the idea on which his concept of “archaeology of the future” is based. With Tsuyoshi Tane, memory is once again an indispensable value for building the future with signs that are pregnant with meaning, alternative to the votive identities and rapid information flows of the contemporary world. Places always have memories deeply embedded in the ground. This process of thinking deeply, from the past towards the future, slowly transforms archaeology into architecture.