ART AND WINE

The work consists of a poetic neon streak installed along the corridor of the portico leading to the winery’s production area, where the grapes are processed. The whorls, spelling out the words hand and land, mimic the typical shape of creepers such as grapevines, whose shoots extend to find tactile supports that allow the plants to grow well beyond the trunk. The long perspective draws the viewer forward in order to discover the content of what appears to be a text. The language is deconstructed in a luminous array of forms paying tribute to the work of tending the vineyards and the tactile intimacy of the profound bond between body and nature. The word ‘and’ connects the other two words (hand/land), which also contain it, becoming a kind of mantra in which the sign continues to appear and disappear in a series of potentially infinite juxtapositions between signifier and significance. The calligraphic trace hovers dynamically and irregularly over the surrounding geometric industrial architecture, in a subtle dialogue with the slow process of winemaking, which begins with tending the soil and ends with the bottling of the local point of pride, Franciacorta wine.

Born in Palermo in 1991, Irene Coppola explores the interface between nature and culture and the political aspects of displays, using diverse media ranging from sculpture to video to environmental installations. She has participated in artist-in-residence projects in Italy and abroad, among which: AndAndAnd for Documenta13, PACA_Proyectos Artisticos Casa Antonino (Spain), Dolomiti Contemporanee, La Wayaka Current (Panama/Chile). She won the VI Italian Council in 2019 and in 2021 published Habitat 08°N, edited by Viaindustriae. She also won Cantica21, an award sponsored by the MiC (Italian Ministry of Culture) and the MAECI (Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation), for an original work created for the permanent collection of the RISO Museum, in Palermo. In 2022 she was invited to realize a new installation by the Italian Cultural Institute in Dakar (Senegal), as a collateral project for the Dak’Art biennial. In 2023 she was nominated fellow artist by the Fondazione Studio Rizoma, in Palermo, and in 2024 she continued on her artistic path in Chile, with the support of the XII Italian Council. The following are among the one-person and group shows in which her work has been featured: IIC in Dakar, FPAC, PAV, Palazzo Strozzi, Palazzo Re Rebaudengo, Cercle Cité, Palais De Tokyo.

The sculpture is a circular structure 5m in diameter opening into two semicircles weighing 25 hundredweights each. Its design was completed in 1987, while creation and installation concluded in 1993. The sculpture, positioned at the entrance to Ca’ del Bosco, was commissioned by Maurizio Zanella, who engaged sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro to make a gate that would be an emblematic entry into the vineyards and the whole estate. This circular gate, with its arrow-like, outward pointing rays, is a symbolic consecration of the rapport between wine and art: a huge sun because, as Zanella states, “from the sun comes the real nourishment of the grape, whose own rays warm and illuminate the gentle Ca’ del Bosco hills.”

Arnaldo Pomodoro was born in the province of Rimini and, after studying architecture, debuted as a designer, decorator and craftsman of metal. In Milan he was a habitué of Brera Academy artistic circles in the 1950s and in 1954 began to exhibit in Italy and abroad. Many of his works can be seen today in cities worldwide and he is considered to be Italy’s greatest contemporary sculptor.

The sculpture appears to be in a condition of equilibrium or slow reawakening from a state of conscious, as well as bodily, drowsiness. The squatting figure clasps herself as she hunches in a foetal position and seems to be stretching slowly. The face evokes delicacy and a fragility of the soul that is powerfully reinforced by a very special “skin” of coloured jigsaw-puzzle pieces. This scaly epidermis harbours hidden codes and languages. It is a protecting screen, a route to be decoded or a map to be read. The pieces are a filter, separating interior from exterior, even as they outline the figure’s nakedness.

abarama is the nom d’art of Paola Epifani, born in Rome in 1969. From a young age, she showed a natural talent for sculpture and at the age of ten, took part in the International Exhibition for the 30th Anniversary of NATO. After attending art school, she went on to the “Academy of Fine Arts of Venice”, graduating in 1991. She is known for her sculptures based on the human figure with their remarkable intensity of expression. Her giant bronze and aluminium works are generally floor-mounted. Rabarama’s sculptures are nearly always decorated with patterns, textures or drawings, which on her metal sculptures are coloured by hand. Since 2000, her works have been exhibited at prestigious museums in Italy and abroad, particularly in the USA and Paris.

Chersicla transforms the god Dionysus into an amusing mask, into a clown issuing from a flûte glass. The design seems almost inspired by a Gothic window where, once opened, the grapes and leaves crowning his head appear to branch out like vine shoots. The ironic and absolutely spare style expresses the naturalness of the god of wine while emphasizing his joviality, lightheartedness, jesting and prankishness, as intuited from his arch expression.

Born in Trieste, he has lived in Milan since 1966. He has created public works of exceptional caliber ranging from wooden sculpture to xylography. In contemporary sculpture the artist’s works are constructed, in the sense that they open  being articulated  to form different images made of pieces of cut, smoothed and colored wood that become almost mechanical parts leaving room for new interpretations. Craftsmanship and modernity interweave in the movement, becoming a play of shapes. Among his best-known works are the sculpted doors at Savini restaurant in Milan and the Dionysus Gualtiero Marchesi displays at his Il Marchesino.

Rado’s new found passion for sculpture and his mastery of stainless steel are expressed in this new medium, which he has called the Mercury effect.

Rado Kirov was born in Bulgaria in 1955. Rado began an extensive apprenticeship in copper smithing at the age of 25 in the town of Dobrich Bulgaria under tutelage of Alexander Raev, one of the greatest craftsmen in Bulgaria at the time. Rado’s passion and skill in copper, shifted to silver and gold. Over the last 15 years, Rado gradually shifted his creative focus to product design and functional art working extensively with interior designers and architects. Rado Kirov developed a unique technique of manipulating a sheet of stainless by hand, using the inherent physical properties of the metal to create a striking three-dimensional surface that dynamically mirrors its surronding and draws the observer into the magic of its reflection.

Water in dripping continues the intrinsic link between the sculptures and the literary texts that inspire their creation. The artist appropriates a poem composed by Pai Chu-I (also known as Bai Juyi), a renowned poet of the Tang Dynasty as the basis of the textual component in this piece of art. Exploring the locomotion of the nature of water and embedded within the sculptural shape, therein lies the chosen poem that speaks of a symbolic voyage of nature and mobility. Looming and graceful but nevertheless inviting, it is also notable that the installation is lit with low-dimmed lighting that at once glows and dramatizes the contours of the overall construction.

Zheng Lu was born in 1978 in Chi Feng, Mongolia. He studies sculpture at the Lu Xun Fine Arts Academy and he specializes firstly at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, then in France where in 2006 he obtains the Scolarship Prix LVMH at the ‘École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts in Paris. Among the prizes he won, the Inspired Performance Journey, the Gran Premio INFINITI, 4° place at the competition Design For Sitting in 2009, the Prize Best Tecnique and the Prize LVMH Young Artist “Homage to the Impressionists” in 2005.

Its imposing presence pays homage to the Testimoni born in limestone in 2009 from the echoes of the celebrated Mothers of Capua’s Museo Campano. Here it keeps vigil over time and history. Its iconic power, unarmed and disarming, protects the precious treasure contained in the bottles resting in the shadows.

Mimmo Paladino was born in Paduli (Benevento) in 1948 and currently works in both his hometown and Rome. He is one of the leading representatives of Transavantgarde, the artistic movement theorised in 1980 by art critic Achille Bonito Oliva receiving full recognition in the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale of that same year. The artists part of the movement advocated a return to painting as opposed to the de-materialization embraced by Minimalism and Conceptual Art. Over the 1980s Paladino’s artistic research integrated abstract visuals with elements of figuration. By exploring myth and honing archetypical figures, Paladino postulates an archaic, Mediterranean, oneiric art centred on the theme of memory and fragment. His statues are icons, antique geometrical masks, forming an alphabet of signs framed in a cyclic pattern of return. His 1990s Mountain of Salt installation in Piazza del Plebiscito in Naples, with warrior figures and large horses emerging from the white pile of salt remains one of his most memorable works.

The latest in a series of “Ludoscopes” created since the early 1970s, the Ludoscope installed in Ca' del Bosco, in the Senses Dome, does not highlight emptiness as “absence,” but as essence and insubstantial presence not yet defined and yet visible in the intimate dimension of space. It is a suspended condition, with a temporary temporariness, shattered and reduced to pieces, born to be “infinite.” An insubstantial vision of incorporeal presences that take form through the use of real light. The virtual containers from the primary form, through the use of neon light and mirrors, transform and alter the geometric form by disproportionately multiplying the functionality in a synthetic space-light.

He was born in Siracusa (Sicily) in 1934. From the beginning he showed his aptitude for art by entertaining painting studies between Palermo and Catania, also attending for a long time the graphic workshops in Salzburg where he met John Friedlander in whose studio he would later work in Paris. In '65 he moved to Milan where he made his first “Sole” works linked to a lyrical expressionism but already oriented toward a formal synthesis. In 1972 he made “Megalopoli Consumistica” a work of consumerist denunciation composed of a large number of empty wrappings and containers assembled together. Scirpa's work has always tended toward an inner quest, untethered from any relationship of belonging. In the 1970s he shifted from a two-dimensional iconography to the modularity of an object space that light and mirrors transformed into poly-objects. His research is oriented toward a dimension in which light and space become immaterial and spectacular protagonists. It was in 1972 that the Master began the creation of the Ludoscopes, three-dimensional works that, by means of a system of combinatorial games of neon and mirrors, propose the perception of fictitious depths, true light-hyperspaces in which the limit between the real and the illusory is abolished. It was during these years that Scirpa met and frequented the exponents of optic-kinetic art and MAC, including Maestro Bruno Munari, who within his writings would also highlight the playful aspect of the artist's work. In his Ludoscopes the artist is interested in representing not so much real light as “ideal” light, that is, the idea of infinity. In the 1980s the first design interventions on the territory began, gigantic Ludoscopes are introduced through photomontages in: buildings, monuments, archaeological sites and cities, creating dizzying perspective escapes within the landscape. To this day Scirpa continues his work of research and experimentation, proposing works and projects that are always current and avant-garde. He has been a lecturer at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. He lives and works in Milan.