Paolo Staccioli’s Pride of Place

It is no surprise that the work of Florentine ceramicist and sculptor Paolo Staccioli, now on view at the Italian Cultural Institute, should be admired in China and Japan. Both countries share with Italy a high regard for the culture of ceramics. China’s ancient cultural center, Xi’an City, has just honored Mr. Staccioli with an exhibit in the antiquities museum that holds the renowned “Terracotta Army,” buried with the first emperor of China two millennia ago.Born in 1943, the artist began his career as a painter in the early 1970s but reached artistic maturity in ceramics. He worked almost exclusively on canvas until the late 1980s when experimentation with terra-cotta bas reliefs led to a creative leap. He then moved to Faenza, home to the world’s greatest collection of ceramics and a modern center for new technologies in the art. (Faenza, origin of the word “faience,” is virtually synonymous with Italian ceramics.)After studying with master ceramicist Umberto Santandrea, Mr. Staccioli embraced ceramic sculpture and the incomparable beauty of glazes fired using oxygen-reduction techniques. This ancient process, used by the Etruscans, creates a chemical reaction in the glaze that yields radiant gold or ruby lusters. The transparency and iridescence of Mr. Staccioli’s surfaces carry into the present surface effects that were prized in the Renaissance.Lovely as these glazes are, what most distinguishes the work is his sensitivity to cultural memory. He brings to ceramics both an inspired decorative ability and historic motifs already encountered in painting. His forms are steeped in the iconography of early Florentine, Sienese, and Etruscan art. Mr. Staccioli creates a formal universe that is thoroughly contemporary but retains a bond with the Italian past.On exhibit in “Journey in Form: Luminous Ceramics of Paolo Staccioli” at ICI are oversize, hieratic warrior figures, vases, fractured spheres etched with narratives, stylized busts, and a repertory of figures that have their origin in the expressionist figuration of Arturo Martini and the horse-and-rider motifs of Marino Marini. His redglazed cardinals are gentler than Giacomo Manzú’s, more amusing, but the reference is clear.Tall, gaunt, shielded warriors, archetypes of stern vigilance, are compelling inventions. (One of these remains on exhibit in Xi’an.) Slim towers with dichromatic stripes, suggestive of Romanesque fortifications, maintain the martial note. Small, freestanding horses on wheels — evocative equally of childhood and Trojan myth — extend the equestrian theme that dominates Mr. Staccioli’s work.Mr. Staccioli’s vases and steles earn pride of place. Put simply, they are gorgeous. Dynamically stylized horses prance upward and around the base in descending sizes. Luminous white forms against darker glazes — inclduing those unsurpassable reds and celadons — the rearing horses glance backward to Paolo Uccello’s “Battle of San Romano.” Some are touched with an archaic quality that reaches to the caves of Lascaux.Two large warrior bronzes, cast from clay models, are newly installed on long-term display at LongHouse Reserve, in East Hampton. Exhibited throughout Italy and in Belgium, Holland, France, and England, Mr. Staccioli’s work has been shown at the Archaeological Museum in Fiesole, and among the antiquities of the Palazzo Pitti’s Porcelain Museum. It is unusual for a contemporary artist to be exhibited among antiquities. But his disarming contemporaneity, at its finest, seeks common ground with the timeless.Until June 30 (686 Park Ave., between 68th and 69th streets, 212-879-4242).

Paolo Staccioli’s Pride of Place

Paolo Staccioli’s Pride of Place

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