Henraux - Marmo 7 (Eng)

A RC H I T E C T U RE D E S I G N A RT

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A RC H I T E C T U RE D E S I G N A RT

MARMO Annual Magazine Issue no. 7, 2018 April Editor in chief Paolo Carli Editor Costantino Paolicchi Deputy Editor Aldo Colonetti

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Costantino Paolicchi

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Coordinator Manuela Della Ducata Editorial Staff Eleonora Caracciolo di Torchiarolo, Nicola Gnesi

Editor Henraux SpA Printers Industrie Grafiche Pacini Contributors Flavio Arensi, Elena Arzani, Jean Blanchaert, Gianluigi Colin, Aldo Colonetti, Turan Duda, Costantino Paolicchi, Gianluigi Ricuperati, Maurizio Riva, Scholten & Baijings, Andrea Tenerini, Piergiorgio Valente

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Cover Scholten & Baijings, all rights reserved

GLOBALIZATION AS A CREATIVE ADVANTAGE Flavio Arensi

MICHELANGELO, MICHELANGELO, GIVE ME THE LIGHT! Gianluigi Colin

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Translations Romina Bicicchi, Daniel Olmos Photographers Archivio Henraux, Aurelio Amendola, Robert Benson Photography, Manfredi Cirlinci, Davide Curatola Soprana (Urban Reports), Gianluca Di Ioia, Veronica Gaido, Nicola Gnesi, Sasha Gusov, Mario Liguigli, Lorenzo Palmieri, Pasquale Palmieri, Francesco Paolucci, Scheltens & Abbenes

Paolo Carli

MIKAYEL OHANJANYAN THE FEELING OF BELONGING

Editorial Coordinator Eleonora Caracciolo di Torchiarolo

Graphic Silvia Cucurnia, Thetis

EDITORIAL

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TRAVERTINE TAPESTRY Turan Duda

MARBLE AND THE (UN)BEARABLE LIGHTNESS Piergiorgio Valente

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“Printed under the auspices of Henraux SpA” Registration no 3/2017 - 24/02/2017 of the “Registro stampa Tribunale di Lucca”

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THE HENRAUX PRIZE: ART AS RESPONSIBILITY Jean Blanchaert

FROM PATTERNS TO MARBLE Scholten & Baijings

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ITALY IS AN ARCHIPELAGO THE ITALIAN PAVILION BY MARIO CUCINELLA FOR THE 16TH VENICE ARCHITECTURE BIENNALE Aldo Colonetti

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KATHELIN GRAY BURROUGHS FRIEND Gianluigi Ricuperati

GIOVANNI ALLEVI FROM TRADITION TO CONTEMPORARY CLASSICAL MUSIC Elena Arzani

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WOOD AND MARBLE: NATURE TAKES SHAPE Maurizio Riva

MONTE ALTISSIMO, STILL AT THE FOREFRONT OF GREAT CINEMA Costantino Paolicchi

THE REPRISAL OF THE EXCAVATION ON MOUNT ALTISSIMO DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY FEATURED IN THE WORK OF THE SWISS PAINTER JEAN CHARLES MÃœLLER Andrea Tenerini

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THE LUCE DI CARRARA SHOWROOM: MULTIPLE FUNCTIONS FOR MULTIPLE IDENTITIES Aldo Colonetti

BY PAOLO CARLI PRESIDENT OF HENRAUX SPA AND HENRAUX FOUNDATION

dialogue on William Burroughs with one of his most trusted friends, Kathelin Gray.

And of course as always, sculpture, photography, architecture and design. We like culture and we fly its flag.

Our heartfelt thanks go to the contributors who have generously offered their skills, transforming this edition into a mystery box, rich in insights and knowledge to discover, and for making it a new thread in the rich history of Henraux.

Henraux is an efficient company, focused on international horizons, but it is also a big family, in which people with great human qualities converge with important professional experiences.

Marble is the base on which this unrepeatable mix of ingredients flows and is shared with our readers, who are now invited to take part.

Enjoy your read!

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For Henraux, marble is a testing ground.

Moreover, within all of the areas in which the company moves - architecture, design and art - the approach is always the same: experiment, discover and evolve.

We also do this on the editorial front, respecting the original project so that it remains very relevant in terms of themes and aesthetics.

In this latest issue of “Marmo” we wanted therefore to insert a new element by extending the concept of ‘art’ to a broader idea that includes, not only visual art but which also other forms of expression: music, cinema and literature.

This is why readers will discover an interview with Giovanni Allevi, who reveals some details of his family history alongside his professional one, a report of a meeting with the great filmmaker Andrej Končalovsky who saw Henraux in the spotlight, a refined

BY COSTANTINO PAOLICCHI

MIKAYEL OHANJANYAN THE FEELING OF BELONGING E

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PHOTOS BY NICOLA GNESI

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In 2014 the artist won the second edition of the Henraux International Sculpture Award with The materiality of the invisible.

Mikayel Ohanjanyan is a young sculptor of Armenian origin, who has lived and worked in Italy for over eighteen years.

After graduating from the Yerevan Academy of Fine Arts in 1998 he took part in the XIII International Dantesca Biennial of Ravenna, winning the third prize, later he moved to Florence, where he attended the Academy of Fine Arts.

“The call to art – wrote Vazgen Pahlavuni Tadevosyan, in art “Vazo” – pushed Ohanjanyan to join the great cultural historical movements in continuous transition between East and West, between north and south, between centers and suburbs”. It is that vast and unstoppable “circularity” of culture that, today more than ever, allows a universal, cosmopolitan vision of reality and art. The sculptor declares himself to be proud of his Armenian identity, of his belonging to

a thousand-year-old culture and tradition: “I am an Italian citizen, but culturally I belong to Armenia – he said in an interview with Francesca Alix Nicoli. The article from 26th May 2015, appeared in Artribune – [...] Simply, I was born there, my roots are there”. Immediately afterwards he defines the meaning of “belonging”, which is something that has nothing to do with the political borders, “invented to manage people and territories”, but a deep, almost ancestral link with the culture and history of a people.

“I carry my culture inside me – he told Vazo – but I constantly enrich it with my new research and experiences”. The artist feels projected into a universal, cosmic dimension, on a path that summarizes the dynamics and the meaning of two distinct places that is nevertheless integrated into his research and his spirituality: the

Left Mikayel Ohanjanyan Mikayel Ohanjanyan, The materiality of the invisible #1, 2015, Bianco Altissimo marble, steel cables

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one in which he lives, which corresponds to a level of a contemporary experience that constantly changes due to different latitudes and sensitivities, and the one from which it comes: Armenia, vibrating with suggestions and references and yet firm in time with its epos, its traditions, the historical and anthropological sediments and the magic of its landscape. Vazo noted in his article entitled The Circle of Return. Speaking of the art of Mikayel Ohanjanyan that: “He acts as if he is in a ‘continuous and infinite’ journey along a spiral path that projects him into the future and rebounds him in an eternal return to the culture of his origins”.

In 2014 the artist won the second edition of the Henraux International Sculpture Award with The materiality of the invisible, after a strict selection made by a highly qualified commission and a prestigious jury presided

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Views of the Tasnerku (twelve) work from 2015, comprised of basalt, corten steel cables, exhibited at the 56th Venice Biennale

Golden Lion for best national participation, together with a group of other eighteen artists, with a project curated by Adelina von Fürstenberg at Ca’ Zenobio (Isola San Lazzaro degli Armeni in Venice), home to the Mekhitarist Armenian congregation for the last three hundred years.

In some ways the Venice Biennale was an opportunity to rediscover the reasons for a feeling, a “vibration”, or, as the sculptor defines it, “a spatial rhythm linked to that geographical place, to that place where I was born and raised, which is called Armenia”, as printed in Nicoli’s article.

During an interview given at an exhibition in the cloister and in the loggia of the Palazzo della Sapienza, organized by the University of Milan in 2016; the artist declared that ever since he was a boy and since the days of the Academy, when he frequented his homeland, he has always felt the urgency of a breakage, of a clear dissociation in respect to formal aesthetics, with the perception of form and space, the urgency to cancel everything he had previously learned and experienced. He

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over by the art historian and critic, Philippe Daverio.

From that moment, the Henraux workshops in Querceta have become the usual workplace of the sculptor, who through the use of marble has begun an important phase of his already prestigious career.

His award-winning work demonstrates an empty space as a form, while matter, compressed by steel cables, creates new perspectives and new spatial relationships.

As we can read on the Award’s official website, it is a symbolic reading of the centuries-old activities of the Apuan quarries where marble is extracted, establishing intimate connections in the relationship between man, his work and the land; between matter and spirit; between the static and the dynamic; between dissonance and balance. This is a relationship that continuously shapes and changes the landscape, suggesting new relationships, not only of the physical but also the sensory and the psychic.

After the success of winning this award, in the following year Mikayel won the

There is an always recognizable and courteous will to transmit positive messages in Ohanjanyan’s work: peace, freedom, tolerance, sharing and solidarity. There is a concern for harmony and beauty that seems aimed at ensuring a sure hope for men.

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Mikayel Ohanjanyan, Diario, 2016, Bianco Altissimo marble, iron, steel cables

sought archaic forms, simple and powerful, that came from within the depths of his soul as messages decipherable through much effort of research: “This is how I decide to reject everything and start from the analysis of a simple, essential form: I start from a cube”.

At the Milan exhibition, Ohanjanyan participated with two works: Sculptures of dissonance, as he called them, dedicated to music, with which he investigated the concept of the balance of form in space.

“In my work”, he said, “research of space and form is always related to the human being”. The artist tries to define a concept of new humanism through both his own intuition and formal proposals.

This unitary matrix is always recognizable in Ohanjanyan’s work, the courteous will to transmit positive messages: peace, freedom, tolerance, sharing and solidarity.

There is a concern for harmony and beauty that seems aimed at ensuring a sure hope for men, for all men of good will in these times of great uncertainty and severe lesions.

Additionally, the search for a spatial rhythm, the conjugation of a balance of forms in space, the harmony between empty and full, between presence and absence, with the acquisition of a constant, appears consistently in this incredibly sensitive and cultured artist’s new perspectives in which are placed the simple forms of his intuition. This is seen in his marble or basalt cubes joined together and deformed by the tension and divergent forces acting through the pulling of taut cables anchored to symbolic essential structures.

After attaining successes in Paris and London, Mikayel Ohanjanyan created

in Armenia, in the summer of 2017, a monumental work titled Le Porte di Mher. The work is inspired by the Armenian epic Sasna Tsrer (Daredevils of Sasun) which narrates the story of four generations of heroes and their extraordinary adventures in the defense of freedom, justice and moral values. The legend also includes the tragic story of the last hero Poqr Mher who, disdained by the injustices that oppress men, split a rock close to Lake Van and locked himself inside, waiting to emerge in a better, more just world. The sculptural work is made up of four basalt blocks, representing the four cardinal points of the compass. Each block is in turn bound and almost split into two parts by steel cables which deform the stone with a dynamic tension that is unnatural and symbolic. As before, this work, which recalls the formal decisions made for the most recent sculptures, appears to be charged with a tension that is not only physical but also psychological, as indicated by the artist: suspended between dream and matter, between interiority and exteriority. At the center of both the artistic vision and the creative inspiration of this young artist can always be found the human being replete with his aspirations and contradictions, with the energy capable of transforming reality but also with his weaknesses and pain. This is why Ohanjanyan’s sculptures tend to expand into a cosmic dimension, to seek balance and harmony even in the opposing dynamics of forms in space which are reunited and finally communicate within the totality of the work.

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BY FLAVIO ARENSI

GLOBALIZATION AS A CREATIVE ADVANTAGE

Roberto Fanari, Sei settembre duemilasedici, 2016, environmental dimensions

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When it is considered that the artist, like the architect and also the poet, must strictly adhere to the precise context of a region or place, an enormous misunderstanding is committed which diverts the gaze in the direction of folklore rather than cultural development.

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Mario Liguigli, View of the Rodin exhibition, at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, 2013

In the increasingly harsh contraposition between the local and global, a broad theme of identity must be recognised. This does not only mean the protection or rediscovery of the cultural roots of a social structure, but can also be identified within a wider meditation on man. Often architecture has made the choice concerning materials as a development of the territory of origin, in a sort of defense of the characteristics or of the genius loci, as a retaliation to the alleged debasement carried out by globalization and technology. In truth, in the narrow context of art, the material like the medium has passed and will always pass through a strict sieve comprised of necessities and

obligations. From economic responsibilities to those that distinguish the status symbol of certain products when compared to others, just think of the blue of lapis lazuli as used in paintings, synonymous with great possibilities of wealth by ancient patrons.

When it is considered that the artist, like the architect and also the poet, must strictly adhere to the precise context of a region or place, an enormous misunderstanding is committed which diverts the gaze in the direction of folklore rather than cultural development. This, in addition, does not provide any real policy of safeguarding traditions or cultures. The new market possibilities of diminished borders

The primacy of ingenuity, of the artifact’s underlying idea over its material note, must remain clear.

terracotta was in response to a sense of taste more than an idea of local identification or ease of finding, so much so that a disengagement went hand in hand with stylistic changes, it can be imagined that one day it will be rediscovered.

The intent of the artist is what remains, however. His desire to communicate a language which recounts through images, so his rendering cannot be confined to a narrow range of options, only by virtue of being an alleged “anti-globalist”.

On the other hand, it is possible to understand the power of one’s own tradition and submit it to a type of renewal capable of updating its signs to a new linguistic

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Augusto Perez, Testa d’uomo, 1960, bronze, 56x23x23 cm (shown at XXX Biennale di Venezia, 1960), Private Collection, Milano

and the lenient customs practices have allowed a greater transmission of cheaper technologies and products than in the past, and this certainly does not degrade artistic options. The primacy of ingenuity, of the artifact’s underlying idea over its material note, must remain clear. If it is true that the granite blocks used to build the Pyramids of Giza came from eight hundred km away, before being covered, or that the rock and precious stones for the Taj Mahal came from all over the East, it is completely understood that the need to identify local materials is guaranteed to be a false idea, if subordinate to the creative act.

In Lombardy, for example, the use of

Lorenzo Palmieri, Giochi di bambini

by Auguste Rodin (Rodin. Il marmo, la vita Palazzo Reale, Milan, 2013)

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It is unthinkable to consider that to undertake new forms of cultural “mixing� is to debase, because some artists are able to work referring to a world that exists prior to experience and in that outline are the traces of their new achievements.

system. It becomes a modernization that manages to maintain all the vitality of history.

It is difficult to think that the Sicilian light did not influence the imagination of Guttuso or that of Guccione. It is impossible not to find the dimmed lights of Hammershoi in the painting of Kahlo, but the exploited medium is entirely secondary. In fact, the history of the late twentieth century teaches us that some specific materials have found their own theoretical aversion to some artistic currents by virtue of the ideology or ideal that have been brought to them.

Some artists of the 1970s did not infrequently avoid or contest bronze and marble as residuals of a previous temperament absolutely to be averted, only to rediscover them in recent times, although perhaps this was in response to market demand. It was in fact unthinkable that the heroes of Arte Povera could continue along the path led by Vangi, Boldini, Perez and many other artists, engaged in a kind of upholding of traditional language, for their actions they were accused of academicism.

They understand that it is time to recover or even to liberate the options of material of young artists who emerged in the eighties, those of the Transavantgarde for example,

and in particular Paladino who returned to exploit the foundries in order to call into question a principle of total freedom that was in itself, totalizing. Whilst Cragg collected discarded plastic objects for his colorful installations, the Italians found a sense of belonging to the history of art through the use of traditional materials, not with a didactic intent, but to establish a new model of aesthetic investigation.

For Paladino the message that came from the image became important, whether the stone came from the Vicenza quarries or from Campania tuff, he bent the technique and the medium to achieve his results. On the other hand, even a great sculptor like Rodin sought out his stone based upon the economic possibilities of the buyer, sometimes cheating through the use of less refined sources, passing them off as noble, this was certainly not done due to a protectionist affinity.

If the center-of-mass of the problem between what we are and what we will be, is not how we can express ourselves and with what means, it remains fundamental to recognize that the boundaries within which we must move in every field linked to communicating our being, define its identity. It is unthinkable to consider that to

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Donato Piccolo, Sebastiano. The night owl, 2014, polyester resin and platinumcure silicone rubber, mechanical arms, felt-tip pen, electrical system, courtesy Galleria Mazzoli, Berlino

However, it is through this re-mixing we find the possibility of recovering what local tradition offers, as a creative advantage rather than an ideological disadvantage.

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Top and right, Pasquale Palmieri, views of Mimmo Paladino’s works at Forte del Belvedere, Florence, 1993

undertake new forms of cultural “mixing” is to debase, because some artists are able to work referring to a world that exists prior to experience and in that outline are the traces of their new achievements. It is in the content of the message, in its ability to reach the public and convince it to a membership, that the expression is qualified. The difference compared to the past is the speed with which cultures mix and change, of course this is because technology allows people to move in a tremendous manner when compared to the great migrations of the past. However, it is through this re-mixing we find the possibility of recovering what local tradition offers, as a creative advantage rather than an ideological disadvantage. It would be very simplistic to assume that Noguchi could not use Carrara marble because he was an American, as well as totally implausible to think that certain stones and certain colours are only to be used to the advantage some artists. In Romanesque windows we find a prevalence of greens and yellows in the

Germanic world, of blue and red in the French, this is not an issue of taste, but one concerning the availability of materials in that precise historical period. It would be detrimental not to take advantage of the opportunities of our time, as long as these are intended as secondary to the final message that one wishes to convey. For this reason the principle idea is not what we use but who we are, because through the representation of our existence we can find the best way to exploit both our resources and our capabilities.

In the mid 1970s, the critic Gianfranco Bruno designed an exhibition that traced an identity from Rembrandt to Segal, which crossed the boundaries, local stories, their traditionality, to signify an existential situation, within whose limits any event responded to, or presented, a collective need. Identity is a fact of the soul, it’s just not the wearing of costumes or of the exploitation of local stone.

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GIVE ME THE LIGHT!

MICHELANGELO, MICHELANGELO,

BY GIANLUIGI COLIN

Aurelio Amendola, Michelangelo’s Pietà, 1998

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He has photographed the great sculptures of Michelangelo, Canova and Bernini like no one else.

His images have been reproduced in all the volumes of the history of art, his eye certifies a model of vision, it’s as if it were the key to really understand the deepest style of a sculptor.

Gianluigi Colin and Aurelio Amendola Photo Nicola Gnesi

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There is a photographer who, among Italian artists, perhaps more than any other, embodies the identity of his land and at the same time is able to look at the universality of creation. On the other hand, just listen to his accent from Pistoia and hear him invoke his old traveling companion laughing: “Michelangelo, Michelangelo, give me the light”. It’s not a joke: Amendola really feels the need to talk to Michelangelo. Ironically, he always repeats: “He is my guardian angel”.

Amendola is very direct, authentic and irreverent. It is as if there are two personalities residing in him: a man with at differing times a sunny disposition and an explosive, empathic character. He is a toscanaccio who plays with his words and does not seem to take himself seriously. He regards himself, and the world with an air of irony. But in addition, he is also a man of the highest professionalism, rigorous, meticulous, demanding and strict. Almost maniacal in defending his vision of the world: a true discipline of the gaze. He has photographed the great sculptures of Michelangelo, Canova and Bernini like no one else.

His images have been reproduced in all the volumes of the history of art, his eye certifies a model of vision, it’s as if it were the key to really understand the deepest style of a sculptor and their relationship with matter.

Concerning matter, Amendola has returned to its origins, where marble finds its light: to

photograph the quarries of Altissimo. But in spring, with the right light: “See – he says, speaking in a low voice – these mountains speak to us in a different way when the light changes. Before making a photograph I have to listen to the mountain. I place myself there and wait”.

It is for these reasons, for his passion, for his almost mystical vision, for his irrepressible enthusiasm and for his dedication to his work, the greatest museum directors and art book publishers want him, especially him.

Nobody interprets the matter of marble like Amendola, transforming it into something vibrant and alive, a delicate and sensual skin to be caressed with the eye. Aurelio Amendola brings with him the sense of joy in art, he provides the magic of an epiphany, reveals what the eye does not see (which sometimes is not even really possible to see), but above all he manages to give back something unconscious and not immediately perceptible: a sense of possession. Looking at an image of one of “his” sculptures, either Michelangelo’s David or Canova’s Grazie, one has the privilege of “owning” the idea of the invention, of being able to go beyond that unreachable aura that surrounds every great work of art.

In the museum of the Borghese Gallery in Rome, Amendola is working on Bernini’s sculpture. At the dawn of his eighties (recently celebrated) the photographer moves with all the enthusiasm of a boy. He has an assistant who follows him and helps

him with the devotion, but he always carries the bag containing his large camera-field himself. Yes, because Aurelio is very much linked to the tradition of photography: he customarily uses a solid and heavy Sinar with 4x5 cm plates, he personally prints the photos in his darkroom and only concedes to modern technology for scans and rare prints on refined cotton papers. One could say a man of other times, but it is not like that at all. On the contrary, he is attentive to the transformations of languages and tastes, or rather, as Gillo Dorfles would say, “to trends and trends of trends”.

Amendola arrives punctually at 7pm, as soon as the last visitor leaves one of the most beautiful museums in the world. He will remain there until two o’clock in the morning. Around us, are the masterpieces of the Renaissance that were collected

by Cardinal Scipione Borghese and now returned to the community: Raffaello’s La Fornarina, Tiziano’s Amor Sacro e Amor Profano and Caravaggio’s The Bacchino, to give just a few examples. And in the center of the rooms, the collection’s marvelous sculptures.

The celebrated sculpture that portrays Paolina Bonaparte of Canova, for example, and many other Bernini masterpieces.

Amendola enters quickly and without wasting any time, jokes with the caretaker: “I’m looking for a young lady named Daphne. Do you know where she is?”.

It is impossible for the photographer to

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Aurelio Amendola, Michelangelo’s David, 2001

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Aurelio Amendola, Antonio Canova’s Tre Grazie, 2008

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refrain from joking: walking through life with lightness and disillusionment appears to be an essential ingredient in his way of seeing the world. The caretaker smiles and accompanies the small group to stand in front one of the most intense works

by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Apollo and Daphne, made between 1622 and 1625, a piece which evokes Ovid’s fable from the Metamorphoses.

Apollo and Daphne stand before us.

As Thomas Mann recalls “Myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless pattern, the pious formula, into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious”. And that’s why the myth always surrounds us. The artists of the Renaissance knew this well and Bernini knew it too: in this sculpture he interprets the story of Apollo who is hit by a golden arrow loosed by Eros in revenge, which makes him fall in love with the beautiful Daphne, nymph follower of Diana. Daphne is also hit, but by a lead arrow which causes her to refuse love and ask to change her appearance. Here Daphne is captured

by Bernini right at the climax of the metamorphosis: while turning into a laurel tree. Apollo reaches his beloved but can not even touch her body which has already transformed into a tree. This is a scene full of poetry and tragedy. It is from this moment that the laurel has entered classical iconography and will go on to appear as a symbol of art and poetry, of immortality and glory.

I think of how the human soul is, thanks to the arts above all, a matter of narratives that pass beyond the confines of time. I watch Aurelio who is carefully at work: I look at his gestures, I try to steal a photography master’s secrets. Aurelio Amendola has a special talent, that of knowing the Art within the story of art.

As a collector of “interior landscapes”, Aurelio halts, in a state of contemplation.

Then, as if needing to interrupt a magic that is too compassionate, he returns to his lightness: “That Michelangelo jerk will be jealous I’m photographing Bernini...”. And there is liberating laughter, as if to make the

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sacredness of the place more confidential.

But despite the jokes, Aurelio, never once loses concentration. Not surprisingly, a silence full of tension and promises immediately surrounds us Amendola demands absolute darkness: he closes all the windows, he does not want any source of light that is not his.

He leaves nothing to chance. I see him giving quick indications on how to place the lights: two, three lamps. Then he stops, he observes, he moves the position of the illumination by only a few centimeters, more oblique, less oblique, he alters the intensity, the angle, the point where the light must hit. He chooses only two lights, one remains unlit. He does not use a flash, but instead a continuous source. And little by little, it is as if the sculpture is coming alive.

Amendola is a master of the Epiphany. His greatest quality is to reveal what is usually hidden, what we cannot see, what we cannot understand.

And then, afraid of disturbing him, I ask: “Do you always set up the lights in the same way?”. He looks at me as if I had insulted him. “No, no... the sculpture asks me for the right light and every time it’s different… This is the biggest challenge.

Each artist sculpts differently. It is through the lights, only through the lights, you bring out the relief of the sculpture, the technique, the ability to shape the material, marble in particular. If you go to see the statue of David in Florence as a tourist, what do you see? A wonderful work, of course, but it is only with the lights that you can discover the sensuality that Michelangelo wanted to give us. Only with the lights”.

As John Berger teaches us: “What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time”.

And it is precisely in the control of light and in time, not so much of the shutter time, but that of the meditation of the gaze, in which photography makes its revelations to the world.

It is as if Aurelio has seized the sedimentation of all the stories of art and wants to erase the stratification in order to start rebuilding a new sense. “A bad photograph is an ugly sculpture”, he repeats, his voice demonstrating a tone of absolute awareness.

“Each time I approach a sculptor it is as

has created extraordinary images with this sculpture, in which not only the work in its exceptional beauty emerges, but above all that which is hidden, which we, can not and will never discover: the detail of the form, the softness of the marble that is transformed into flesh, the tension of the muscles, the veins. The sweetness of the Virgin’s gaze and the intense face of Christ.

But let’s go back to his way of photographing: “The skin: which is, I believe, the focal point for Aurelio Amendola, the greatest difficulty, is to ‘understand’ the skin,” wrote the art historian Arturo Carlo Quintavalle.

And it’s true: Aurelio manages to give a look beyond the invisible. The great artist Diane Arbus said: “A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know”. And so, Aurelio Amendola, especially while photographing The Pietà, has built a text made up of shadows, revelations and obscurity, as if to say that our lives are also a collection of light and shadows.

But Aurelio who, as we have seen, speaks with Michelangelo every day, seems to have been given some first-hand advice: it is as if the creator of that extraordinary sculpture in which the youth of the Madonna becomes a powerful theological declaration of purity and immaculate conception, directed his friend from Pistoia to reveal the hand on the cloth, the perfect profile of the Virgin, the poignant perfection in the face of the deceased Jesus.

In short, it is as if Michelangelo really had guided the gaze that, as the great Vasari describes as follows: “The rarest artist could add nothing to its design and grace, or finish the marble with such polish and art, as much as Michelagnolo did, because you can see in it, all the value and the power of art”.

Aurelio Amendola is a great lion of photography, but above all he is a toscanaccio prankster. I cannot say if he really speaks with Michelangelo. I only know that he is a teacher. And that he succeeds, like no one else, to restore the emotion of seeing beyond the visible.

And I also know that, as Hermann Hesse remembers: “The meaning of art is: to show God in everything”.

Aurelio Amendola in in his studio Photo Nicola Gnesi

Left Aurelio Amendola at work

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if I started from the beginning. It is the sculpture that gives me the lights. Every sculptor has a different body. Michelangelo possesses a great sensuality. Bernini is more refined, more complex. Michelangelo’s back is not Bernini’s back. The same applies to contemporary artists: I think of when I photographed the works of Pablo Atchugarry at the Trajan markets, I think of Pietro Cascella, but also of old works from when I began to photograph the sculpture, of Jacopo della Quercia, Giovanni Pisano and Marino Marini. I was lucky: I started by photographing stones and plaster, now I’m here, in front of Daphne and Apollo”.

Amendola becomes serious. He looks intensely at the sculpture: “It’s very difficult!

The sculpture is full of precious details, rich in subtle fragments, it is necessary to show the transparency of the leaves, I wonder how Bernini managed to create this effect with marble. He’s an absolute genius”.

“Color plays out, black and white is more loaded with meaning”, recalls Jean Baudrillard. Perhaps this is the reason why his true language is black and white.

The life of Aurelio Amendola is lived in black and white. The black and white used in photography evokes the memory. The memory of these images settles inside us and becomes linked to our feelings. For this reason, looking at Amendola’s black and white photos, we experience feelings that brings us back to a history which has been lived, a sense of belonging, identity and so deep bonds are created.

“Which are the sculptures I love most? It might seem banal, but the Pietà of San Pietro and the Rondanini Pietà are my favorites. I am always enchanted in front of these two masterpieces: I think about Michelangelo’s age when he sculpted it: he was 23 years old.

I think of his visionary power, his courage.

And I think of the Pietà Rondanini: he made it at the end, beginning to anticipate the art of our time. But then again, how can you ever choose? It’s like deciding between beautiful women...”.

It is not by chance that Amendola is back in San Pietro, on which he has recently made a very refined book for Franco Maria Ricci.

He confesses he has returned to review one of his loves: Michelangelo’s The Pietà. He

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The site of 601 Massachusetts Avenue - a triangular block created as part of Washington D.C.’s foundational 1792 L’Enfant Plan, became both the source and inspiration for the integration of art into architecture. The constraints of the wedge-shaped city block generated a signature overlapping ‘L’ configuration, which also resulted in unique efficiencies across the building’s floors. The geometry of intersecting diagonal and orthogonal

lines in plan naturally defined a triangular atrium lobby carved into the building’s core.

A portion of the lobby is 22 feet tall and another portion 10 stories high. Together they define a single space that straddles extremes of height. Unifying these two spaces into one architectural statement became a significant challenge - Roman travertine provided the solution.

“I wanted to unroll a magnificent fabric

Left, 601 Massachusetts Avenue, sketch

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Giovanni Balderi’s Le vie della luce in the hall Photo Robert Benson Photography

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how we could, through very simple means, transform travertine into something fluid, lyrical and fabric-like.”

Duda|Paine’s designers fabricated a small, wooden mock-up of the wall to refine its form. Once a final iteration had been developed, that small physical form was used to generate a 3-dimensional digital model. Henraux used the digital model to define the path for the robot to cut the wall’s curving shapes. This combined use of manual craft and digital technology offers profound possibilities for designers, architects and artists. Yet the real artistry for Henraux came with the sequencing of the blocks of stones to create one visually continuous stone element across multiple walls.

“This wasn’t an easy task,” said Duda.

“It required skill and knowing how to sequence the material in such a way that the lobby would feel as though we had literally gone into a quarry and carved out an entire room of one linear bench of stone.

Today, when anything and everything can be automated and done with a computer, it still requires the human eye. It still requires a knowledge about the material, the capabilities of the material, and the expression of the material. One of the reasons Henraux really stands out is its historical support of art. They did all the carving for Henry Moore, Jean Arp, and many other contemporary artists, who would bring in a small clay mockup and ask Henraux to carve it at multiple scales.

Henraux had the knowledge of materials and such a strong awareness of the work of these sculptors. They also had artisans who could take the information given in a mockup and translate it into stone. But, for 30 years, this ability had been lost.

When Paolo Carli took over the company, he said, ‘This is an important part of our legacy.’ Carli has brought Henraux’s heritage back to life.”

For Duda|Paine, located in Durham, North Carolina, art is an essential aspect of creating space, as is the joining of two very strong collaborators.

“Having an entity such as Henraux, who can be your partner in the process of designing, is essential no matter what the

Paolo Carli at Henraux had shown us this Roman travertine, called Renna, which has very strong, distinctive, horizontal sedimentary lines.

The most dramatic thing one can do with linearity is to fold it, bend it, pleat it together like a curtain.

Top, 601 Massachusetts Avenue, sketch

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across the lobby’s three walls to create connection between two very different volumes,” said Turan Duda, FAIA, of Duda|Paine Architects, the project’s Design Principal.

The lobby presents two distinct experiential moments: one upon entering from the street and the other when stepping out of the elevators. The axis of the two paths meet at one point in the lobby, which is marked with a 20-foot tall, freestanding, white marble sculpture

by Giovanni Balderi. The art installation requires people to circulate around it, creating the notion of a landmark within the space. At the other end of the lobby, as a counterpoint to the sculpture, is the transition between the lobby’s low space and its high space. Rather than placing yet another sculptural object, Duda saw the potential for merging architecture and art.

“I thought, let the wall be the figure,” said Duda. “Let the wall be an expression that draws your eye to it. Paolo Carli at Henraux had shown us this Roman travertine, called Renna, which has very strong, distinctive, horizontal sedimentary lines. The most dramatic thing one can do with linearity is to fold it, bend it, pleat it together like a curtain.

By using a single bench in the quarry, the striations could continue all the way around the lobby space, from one end to the other, like the linear pattern of a fabric. Thus, we treated stone in a way that made it feel like fabric, made it feel as though it had the undulation of lines.

We created a stone curtain.”

The result is a series of walls that billow in great waves around the lobby space.

Accomplishing this aesthetic feat required particular skills, capacity and artistic sensitivity. Duda|Paine had maintained a long working relationship with Henraux in Querceta, Italy, and recognized Carli and the Henraux artisans could make the vision a reality. Henraux has a tool that uses a diamond wire on two wheels to cut stone on any axis, which allows the creation of any curved form.

“Seeing that machinery and its technology inspired me,” said Duda, “to think about

Travertine tapestry sketch

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material,” said Duda. “However, when it comes to stone, no one else understands the creative process of ‘making,’ which has a symbiotic relationship with architecture. It is what Henraux does. It’s what they do best.”

Thirty-five years ago, when Duda|Paine and Henraux first began working together, the stone work was still done by hand, with artisans chiseling away material to shape an element. Now, because of time, energy and effort, a robot does much of the greater carving effort, with only the last ten to fifteen percent left to the artisan. For the Balderi sculptural figure in the 601 Massachusetts Avenue project, the majority of marble was removed with a robotic arm, while the final touches were left to the artist.

“It’s as much trying to preserve the art at Henraux as it is about business. Carli wants to maintain a strong association between art and architecture. The architect, or artist, can imagine and draw ideas all day long, but without someone with the skills to execute their vision, it would remain in the sketchbook” said

Duda. “An original sketch was generated from the shape of the site first, then came the building’s form, and, then, once the lobby was defined, came a sketch of the wall. The inspiration for the wall came from feeling a need on one end of the lobby to do something to resolve the space. Otherwise, it would seem empty.”

Though the region’s marble has been utilized since the time of Michelangelo and the Medici family, this new carving technology made the creation of the 601 Massachusetts Avenue lobby possible.

For Duda, the street level lobby’s design is about the experience of walking through cities and observing building lobbies.

“The moment I see art in someone’s lobby, I think the owner or developer is clearly enlightened. Art communicates information about the company, about the corporation, about the fact that they see value in having art in their space. That their purpose is not just commerce - they place a high value on putting art on view for the public.”

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Travertine Tapestry Photo Robert Benson Photography

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Detail of the work Egologo, conceived

by Piergiorgio Valente and executed

by Renzo Maggi in white Altissimo marble supplied by Henraux.

Photo NIcola Gnesi Courtesy of Piergiorgio Valente

BY PIERGIORGIO VALENTE

MARBLE AND THE (UN)BEARABLE LIGHTNESS O

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the prevalence of the abstract on concrete material. He described the process which he had come across, the progressive spiritualization of matter, thanks to the figurative talent of his way of thinking: thanks to an artistic way of considering philosophy. Does not art create meaning for matter? Hegel has indeed written a history of humanity through the history of art. By fertilizing the matter with spirit, he has painted a grandiose fresco, a work of philosophical art that has shaped the infinite peculiarities of the history of the human spirit. His lectures on Estetica are in effect, a masterpiece of synthesis in a form.

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In the context of the ’80s Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being was interpreted with a certain sense of an Italian frankness. The idea that lightness was unbearable was not considered a problem. It was necessary to be light precisely because we did not need strong support, great narratives or references to the previous foundations. It has been said that lightness is unbearable because it does not ask to be supported. There is no need to justify it, legitimize it or to support it on something stable, as must be done with heavy things.

Postmodernism is exactly that, right? If, then, Kundera wanted to be as leaden as the Bohemian skies, and show that a ‘light’ life cannot help us avoid that specific weight that makes us run around in circles, screw and sink to the depths, then too bad for him.

Those of us in the West wanted to find a new horizontal syntax, one which avoided the ancient drilling in the depths of the foundations, to access something playful and liberating but still linked to the messages of tradition.

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In his work on the history of art (N. Merker, [eds.], Estetica, Einaudi, Torino 1997), Hegel was able to arrange the entire history of humanity according to a line that travelled from immediate material

heaviness toward the slight and agile litheness of the spirit. It was the story of the emergence of an intelligence that mediates, interprets and transforms the immediacy of nature. Hegel did not carry out a socalled ontical history of works of art on his line, including only purely historical and material data, when they were made, internal references, the influences. For Hegel, every work of art was a microcosm that within its era, encapsulated the relationship between intelligence and the world. The history of Western art was the story of a consciousness that slowly permeated throughout the world, fecundating its heavy inert matter with meaning.

Matter which therefore became animated, stripping its sensitive character of the framework of simple materiality.

Accordingly, the epochs of art progressed from a predominance of matter to its spiritualization by the act of giving it meaning. It was perhaps, this imperfect understanding of the journey that was then finally completed in the 1980s. A movement from a society of coal and steel and the clangor of the workshop, to a society of hushed digital communication, spectacular representation and finance, in which there was a transition from a world of things to a world of abstract signs of things?

Hegel was the perfect scholar to consider

How has the general picture of human history been presented through the events of art history? It is a naturally tripartite story, according to the ternary rhythms of Hegel’s thought.

The first moment was always the moment of the present, the second was the moment up ahead and the third was the moment of out there. They were the spatial expressions of the personal pronouns: I, You, He. The (stubborn) personal conviction of the ego, the confrontation with a You who contradicts the ego and points out its faults, and finally the sphere of the Third which plays the role of a witness between the two rivals over the definition of truth.

The first moment in the history of humanity was, therefore, the moment of the predominance of the immediate presence of matter, replete with its imposing weight. It was a world of symbolic, pre-classical art, which found its most typical expressions in ancient Egypt, and its appropriate forms in architecture. It was a world of stone, whose meanings could at most be scratched on the surface, in the infinite ribbons of hieroglyphs: but those meanings did not penetrate into the depth of matter to possess it, before returning to re-emerge on its vivified pores.

The great mass remained unconnected to the mobile activity of signification, just as the hieroglyphic remains extraneous to the flexible modularity of alphabetic writing.

Meaning remained on the exterior in respect to matter, just as the colossal statues of the Memnons were made to sing from the outside in response to sunlight – rather than from the interior light of the logos.

used as cladding expresses the substantial solidity that serves as both balance and counterpoint to the marble statuary, which depicts an increasingly particular and accidental individuality.

The classical cutting of marble is always a balance between the substantiality of the universal and the individuality of the hero.

Ever since the beginning, marble has been at the service of the spirit that took consciousness of itself, seeking new balance between the know yourself of the temple of Delphi and belonging to the universality of the polis that holds the collected meaning.

It is not strange that marble had to question itself again during the contemporary era, in the terms of every neoclassicism, that is, after fascism’s extreme reprisal of the classical world. Only then did marble really enter the third age of art, one that Hegel calls romantic. In this, in fact, the classical balance between the individual and the substantial becomes progressively smaller.

Indeed, the susceptible material, in its heaviness, becomes ever more indifferent, and the meaning which one wishes to

express through the work of art comes to the fore. The external susceptible material, throughout the history of art, is lightened and spiritualized, it withdraws in favor of the imponderable dimension of meaning, which becomes dominant.

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How is the lightness of marble lessened?

Design has faced this singular task, together with a plastic art that is emancipated from the Greek balance between meaning and sensible form. In the global age of compacted time, the lightness of the spirit tends to sublimate the solid state of matter into gaseous state of signs and their flux: in digital communication, in financial cadences, in e-commerce.

But is it possible to sublimate marble?

The new formal balance of art, in this age of accomplished abstraction, seems to demand an inverse path in respect to the first cutting. It is no longer a matter of infusing intelligence into matter, but rather of giving substance to the abstraction of signs, and of giving shape to their new strength.

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Symbolic art, is art with which enclosures are built (buildings) that only allude in an external way, to a meaning that is contained inside, and is not explicitly brought to light. Was not the tomb, mute and hidden underground the reason for the pyramid?

It was a world in which the heaviness of the stone was understood in the pyramids, forms of sheer volume, and not of shape. If form is the result of consciousness, the symbolism of Egyptian architecture was then unconscious.

The subsequent Ancient Greek architecture thus belonged to this symbolic universe, but in the act of cutting marble it was already beginning to take on the configuration of individual form. It began, that is, by building enclosures that did not allude to any meaning, that remained underground like a tomb, mute like an animal, enigmatic like a cat. The enclosures of the Greek temple surrounded a statue of a god, manifested in his arrival, to his individual configuration, in the light of the logos. This is the first cut: the period of classical art, which finds its definitive form of art in sculpture, and its pinnacle in the classical era of the Greeks – Pericles’ Athens of the fifth Century. In the Greek temple, there is an allusion to a meaning that is within, but this time it is no longer hidden underground or impenetrable as in the enigmatic Egyptian world.

The signified is now the statue of the god that stands in a cell in the recesses of the temple, but its presence is overshadowed by the permeability of the inside and outside that occurs in the enclosure full of passages and columns. The Greek spirit is always the spirit of shifting to light from darkness.

Here the marble is cut to create an explicit form – not to substantiate a silent mass.

In this cut we take a step back from the immediate presence of here, and we look at ourselves from the outside, as a You would.

And as you know, only by looking from the outside can a shape be configured.

In friezes, metopes and triglyphs, cornices, architraves, columns and capitals, a cutting of marble is already a sculpture that creates distance from the immediate presence of matter, and moves towards the individual form even when it is simply a material used for cladding.

In the Hellenistic period, and then in all the revivals of classical art, the marble block

When you grant a large block of marble the sinuous shape of a paper bag, a flexible ribbon, a sponge or a coral, a propeller seed or a soft pillow, you look for the materiality of the invisible or rather the voluptuousness of plastic foliage, the new substantiality of an era that has evaporated all of the ancient references to substance.

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In this context the second cutting of marble took place, after the first made by classical art: the contemporary cut of the marble takes away from the symbolic enclosure and its claim to fully represent reality, without any remains. In this sense, the extraction from Henraux’s Altissimo (the mountain that was, in Michelangelo’s dream, “so full of marble in all its parts that it could be excavated until the day of Judgment”) offers a perfect metaphor, to depart from the representation of a sense that guarantees all-round order.

It concerns a carving that has decided to no longer distance itself from the hard and weighty materiality of pyramid blocks: it is no longer merely a spiritualization of matter, in order to distance itself from the material laws of biology, blood, the cycle of nature.

It is no longer only a carving that interrupts the vindictive cycle of nature, which brings death to that which it has caused to be born.

The second carving of marble does not only introduce Oedipus’ own knowledge against the animality of the Sphinx: it does not introduce the law of the polis as a less bloody law than that which the terrible Mother Nature generates.

The second, current cutting of marble introduces something radically innovative.

It exposes us to a surface, to a scandalous protuberance, which creates a hindrance for things progressing normally in their own gravity, from presence to disappearance, from body to a sign of memory.

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If there is an of absence sensitive matter, there is an absence of art, and marble is the historical-artistic representation of sensitive matter. But precisely because of its historical-artistic being, the unbearable lightness of marble does not represent organic matter in its original quality, when, at the origins of the cosmos, it was shapeless material before the Demiurge.

When you grant a large block of marble the sinuous shape of a paper bag, a flexible ribbon, a sponge or a coral, a propeller seed or a soft pillow, you look for the materiality of the invisible or rather the voluptuousness of plastic foliage, the new substantiality of an era that has evaporated all of the ancient references to substance.

The question of what sustains us as members of a society equipped with a political plan, in

the era of complete abstraction, of the global streams of digital information and money that mobilise people and goods, is proposed once again.

Do the paradoxically light forms of heavy marble have something to say about that?

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The forms with which we use to represent the world are not in the interior of the mind, but are out there. The forms belong to the essence of the world, they are concepts that are seen, even if this is a perception sui generis, not reducible to mere sensory data.

They open us to the experience of breaking our habits and our expectations, in the encounter with a traumatic exteriority that has some trait of the body.

In this mixture of logos and physicality, somewhere between the normative element and the somatic constituent, lies the decisive gift of the surprisingly contemporary aspect of marble, which is given life in the amazing creations of the artist-man.

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Can a statue gather the meaning of existence in itself? Can the amount,

symbol of a hand that seizes the truth of what it is to be human and defends it. The hand grasps the essence. It is the hand that maintains the cycle of time denial, and that develops technology, it began Pioneer’s interstellar journey. The spacecraft is a message of humanism, through the culmination of the space technology, and of the signs inscribed on its gold plate, waiting like allusive hieroglyphs, for the intelligence of alien civilizations.

The Pioneer space probe – etched upon the EgoLogos – is the missive of the Logos, in a mysterious journey that – with our Ego – we undertake as aliens, that we continue as warriors and that we wish to conclude as wisemen. In comparison with the perfect well rounded world of Pythagorean harmony, EgoLogo tells us that the idealization of the classical world is the dream of what it is not. It is precisely within this that lies the idealization: in the indefinite continuation of a physical presence, in a form that does not experience corruption.

The EgoLogos is something quite apart from a sign of memory. If we were to represent

our spiritual condition using a statue, the ancient symbols of self-possession could also carry within, the labor of a birth of something new.

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In conclusion to these brief notes, I would like to thank three dear friends.

Renzo Maggi, who stands for the dreams of marble in the world of man, and carries out man’s dreams in the things of marble.

Luca Bagetto, who interprets the signs of marble in the things of man and the dreams of man in the signs that they write to us in marble.

Paolo Carli, who (re)produces the dreams of man and the signs of marble and knows how to live with the lightness of being, inside both. For him – artist and entrepreneur – the horizon is never closed: it is positioned along a vector of exit from a statement of fact, towards the opening of space and time, towards the challenge, towards a vanishing point beyond the columns of Hercules.

And all of us, together are reaching out to the ambiguity of what is still yet to be seen.

But what we know exists, invisible, enclosed in marble.

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the pathos and the climax be inscribed in his body? Can it be animated to reveal its spiritual meaning, transposed by human intelligence into its marble pores?

Can they also make it their own experience, and vivify it with the fusion of matter and soul in marble created by time and pressure?

And in so personify the Ego and the Logos?

Can it synthesize the whole of experience, the beginning of its being, the evolution in its making, the parable of adolescence and perspective, in the noble growth and in the slow retreat, along the declining ridge towards the West and the night?

Today we know that the ego is no longer the master of his own house, and that the logical link between things no longer has the function of mirroring a reality that is out there. The last ancient terms of the experience have been revoked in doubt.

A statue – the one of EgoLogos that is lost – could represent the memory of what we no longer are, a sign of memory interrupted by time that has passed, and the expectation of what we could become.

The EgoLogos is the nostalgia of a mastery that we no longer hold: the problematic

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SCHOLTEN & BAIJINGS

A visual path illustrates the design process that led Scholten & Baijings to work with marble in their collaboration with Luce di Carrara and Itlas, an Italian company that specialises in the use of solid, natural wood.

The patterns used by Dutch designers on a most varied selection of media - from fabrics, to wood, to ceramics - have become their stylistic code, and are here applied to the precious stone material to create a collection for the bathroom consisting of drawers, mirrored wall units, washbasins and shelves.

A patented aluminum frame, interlocking wood panels and the new “Marbled Pattern Series� give life to a refined and harmonious project, made possible thanks to the experience, craftsmanship and cutting-edge techniques of Luce di Carrara and Itlas.

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BLOCKS & GRID SCHOLTEN & BAIJINGS FOR MAHARAM Photography Scheltens & Abbenes

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COLOUR WOOD SCHOLTEN & BAIJINGS FOR KARIMOKU NEW STANDARD Photography Scheltens & Abbenes

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SOLID PATTERNS SCHOLTEN & BAIJINGS FOR LUCE DI CARRARA Photography Scheltens & Abbenes

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SOLID PATTERNS SCHOLTEN & BAIJINGS FOR LUCE DI CARRARA Photography Scheltens & Abbenes

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MARBLED PATTERN SERIES ‘Stripe’ Versilys - White filler SCHOLTEN & BAIJINGS FOR HENRAUX

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BATHROOM PROJECT ‘Stripe’ Versilys - White filler SCHOLTEN & BAIJINGS FOR LUCE DI CARRARA AND ITLAS

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MARBLED PATTERN SERIES ‘Dot’ Arabescato Cervaiole Black filler SCHOLTEN & BAIJINGS FOR HENRAUX

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BATHROOM PROJECT ‘Dot’ Arabescato Cervaiole - Black filler SCHOLTEN & BAIJINGS FOR LUCE DI CARRARA AND ITLAS

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BY JEAN BLANCHAERT

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Every time my brother and I were taken to the sea at Poveromo, Ronchi di Massa for our summer holidays, we were amazed at the snow clinging to the mountains in the scorching August heat. Although our parents had informed us that it was in fact, marble, we experienced this amazement every time as if it was the first, much like the case of the naive spectator described by the playwright Alessandro Fersen, the spectator who is afraid, is moved and laughs, even when watching a film for the fifth time.

The perennial snow of the Apuan Alps will always be there to welcome us, just a few kilometers from beaches full of people enjoying their well deserved summer breaks.

During short breaks digger operators, quarrymen, marble cutters, crane operators and lorry drivers, occasionally cast a brief glance at the sea from above and at the beach filled with umbrellas, only to get back to their perennial snows made of marble. Working in a unique landscape that, at first glance seems more exotic

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Jean Blanchaert Photo Nicola Gnesi

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Kim De Ruysscher, Canotto, 2016 Photo Nicola Gnesi

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Daniele Guidugli, Moby Dick, 2016 Photo Nicola Gnesi

Mat Chivers, Newave, 2016 Photo Nicola Gnesi

Sculpture Award: a innovative biannual award that is dedicated to artists under the age of forty five. The sculptor Giovanni Maria Manganelli, who, sadly died prematurely, and the art historian Costantino Paolicchi have been invaluable friends and consultants of Paolo Carli since the inception of this project.

The objective of this enterprise was to bring the habit of thinking in marble back into the academies, among the sculptors and between designers and architects. This endeavor is almost utopian: to resurrect marble in its starring role; a great hero as a medium used in contemporary art. The word medium should be read as the two meanings of the term: both in its strictly etymological meaning, i.e., a means through which an idea is expressed, and in its esoteric meaning, to interpret in marble, the subconscious of the difficult realities of the present-day.

For the first edition of the award, of which I had the honor of being coordinator and general secretary, Paolo Carli alongside, Philippe Daverio, President of the Jury for all three editions, decided to nominate seventeen Academics who in turn would appoint a suitable artist to work with a twenty-ton block of marble,

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The objective of this enterprise was to bring the habit of thinking in marble back into the academies, among the sculptors and between designers and architects. This endeavor is almost utopian: to resurrect marble in its starring role; a great hero as a medium used in contemporary art.

than Tibet. It is here, on the slopes of Monte Altissimo, that for more than five hundred years the great sculptors have gone to choose the marble for their works, many of which have become regarded as masterpieces all over the world.

Once it arrives in the workshops, the marble is treated by the rough-workers, the stonemasons, the finishers, the decorators, the polishers and even the programmers and engineers of those robots that nowadays have the ability to render a drawing in three dimensions. Let us not forget that the great director of all these operations remains the sculptor, the one who ultimately signs the work.

The president of Henraux, Paolo Carli, has been inspired by Erminio Cidonio, the sole director of the company during the 1950s and 1960s. It was he who brought sculptors of the calibre of Henry Moore to Mount Altissimo, and who is now a point of reference for both young and established artists.

When in 2012, President Carli decided to re-establish the relationship between Henraux and the artists, he consulted with Philippe Daverio and, by mutual agreement, they decided to set up the Henraux Foundation International

Mikayel Ohanjanyan, Materialità dell’invisibile, 2014, detail Photo Nicola Gnesi

Fabio Viale, Arrivederci e Grazie, 2012, detail Photo Veronica Gaido

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taken from the Altissimo. Thus was born the Accademia dell’Altissimo, defined

by Philippe Daverio as a “consultation of learned academics” composed of important names from the worlds of art, journalism, architecture and collecting.

Over the years, over the three editions of the award, and including academics and jurors, Henraux has hosted both Italian and foreign personalities who, after this experience, have become ambassadors

of marble and of Henraux throughout the world. The first Academics, being those of 2012, were: Gabriella Belli, Mario Botta, Michele De Lucchi, Jan Fabre, Beppe Finessi, Christos Joachimides, Alessandro Mendini, Marco Meneguzzo, Giuseppina Panza di Biumo Caccia Dominioni, Franco Raggi, Rosa Sandretto, Luca Scacchetti, Pinuccio Sciola, Pino Spagnulo, Ivan Theimer, Giovanna Bernardini, Rossana Orlandi.

Filippo Ciavoli Cortelli, Corallo, 2014, detail Photo Nicola Gnesi

Massimiliano Pelletti, Back To Basic, 2014, detail Photo Nicola Gnesi

Bombardieri, a maple seed so transparent and light, it appears to be in flight, and Bue Tractor sculpture by Mattia Bosco, a profile in high relief of the animal that carried marble for centuries.

The formula has changed since the second edition of the prize, the Academics and Jury have limited themselves in judging the projects received. Giovanna Bernardini, Jean Blanchaert, Marco Carminati, Aldo Colonetti, Dakin Art, Renzo Maggi,

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The Jury of the first award was composed

by Paolo Carli, Philippe Daverio, Michele Bonuomo, Marco Carminati, Veronica Gaido, Patty Nicoli, Daniele Pescali, Vito Tongiani, Giuliano Vangi and Kan Yasuda.

The winner of the first prize was Fabio Viale with his work Arrivederci e grazie, a witty and evocative work of a scabrous affair in New York.

In tied second place, SĂ mara, by Alex

Giovanni Maria Manganelli, Mimmo Paladino, Giuseppina Panza di Biumo, Park Eun Sun, Franco Raggi, Rosa Sandretto, Luca Scacchetti, Pinuccio Sciola, Betony Vernon, have composed the Accademia dell’Altissimo, while the jury consists (besides of course Paolo Carli and Philippe Daverio), of Chiara Beria d’Argentine, Michele Bonuomo, Gianluigi Colin, Stefano Contini, Novello Finotti, Daniele Pescali, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Fabio Viale.

The winner of the Henraux Foundation Prize 2014 was found to be Mikayel Ohanjanyan with his work Materialità dell’invisibile, in which the Armenian artist managed to make the viewer conscious of the presence of steel cables which squeeze, crush and force the marble with the will to tame matter, at the moment when extraction takes place.

In second place was Francesca Pasquali.

Her work Frappa shows she fully understood the potential of the robotic sculpting machine, transforming marble into lace. In joint third place were Filippo Ciavoli Cortelli with his work Corallo that recalls both the calcareous skeleton of precious marine creatures, and of human hands in movement, and Massimiliano Pelletti with the sculpture Back to Basic, a “classic head” riddled and treated with acid.

In 2016, the third edition had two previous important achievements: Fabio Viale won the Cairo Award in 2015 and in the same year Mikayel Ohanjanyan jointly won, together with eighteen other Armenian artists and their curator Adelina von Fürstenberg, the Golden Lion for the Armenian Pavillion at the Venice Biennale.

The Accademia dell’Altissimo is made up of Adriano Berengo, Jean Blanchaert, Gilda Bojardi, Marco Casamonti, Aldo Cibic, Aldo Colonetti, Marino Folin, Andrej Koncalovsky, Daniele Lombardi, Francesco Morena, Giuseppina Panza di

Biumo Caccia Dominioni, Mi Qiu, Franco Raggi, Rosa Sandretto.

In addition to Paolo Carli and Philippe Daverio in the jury, there is Aurelio Amendola, Roberto Bernabò, Mario Botta, Gianluigi Colin, Marva Griffin Wilshire, Francesca Nicoli, Mikayel Ohanjanyan, Claudio Pescio.

The three finalists of this edition were Daniele Guidugli, who won first place with the work Moby Dick, five whale vertebrae presented in a large installation; in second place, the Belgian artist Kim De Ruysscher with Il Canotto, a “beached” rubber boat, similar to those many have seen in recent years in Pozzallo and on Lampedusa; finally, in third place, the English sculptor Mat Chivers with the optical Newave, with which, thanks to the use of white statuary marble from Altissimo and black Marquina side by side, he gives a sense of marine movement.

Erminio Cidonio, who gazes down on us from above, must be happy. His teachings have not been forgotten. The Henraux site in Querceta has started a fruitful collaboration over the last six years, thanks to the awards. A collaboration not only with the ten winners, but also with many other artists coming from all over the world who participated.

In 2018 after three editions conducted masterfully, the presidential baton was passed from Philippe Daverio, director of Art and Dossier, the best-selling art monthly in Italy, to Edoardo Bonaspetti, director of Mousse, the magazine of Italian art that is known among the notable connoisseurs, collectors and galleries around the world.

It is a bimonthly publication in tune with young international art trends.

“The great sculptors who passed through here, from Michelangelo to Henry Moore”, says Mikayel Ohanjanyan, winner of the second edition “have left special vibrations for which we remain responsible”.

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Francesca Pasquali Frappa, 2014 Photo Nicola Gnesi

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The work Frappa shows that she fully understood the potential of the robotic sculpting machine, transforming marble into lace.

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BY ALDO COLONETTI

ITALY IS AN ARCHIPELAGO THE ITALIAN PAVILION BY MARIO CUCINELLA FOR THE 16TH VENICE ARCHITECTURE BIENNALE I

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Mario Cucinella sketch On the left, the first workshop concerning the elaboration of the five architectural proposals, Bologna. Mario Cucinella introduces the themes and areas to the collective.

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The exhibition will be a journey within our country which favours small and medium-sized cities and isolated settlements as opposed to large urbanization processes.

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Arcipelago Italia is the name of the Italian Pavilion in the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, which is to be held from May 26th to November 25th 2018. It is curated

by Mario Cucinella.

Aldo Colonetti: What does the term “Arcipelago” mean when we talk about the state of Italian architecture, in the face of environmental problems, political and commissioning instability, especially in the light of themes such as post-earthquake?

Mario Cucinella: Architecture can be dangerous if we are unable to listen to the voices of a particular community, to respond to the real needs of a territory, especially because the result of our work is not a piece of art or a book that you can freely decide to read or not: you have it in front of your eyes every day, you can not help but see it, this is, above all, true for those who live there.

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A.C.: The exhibition will be a journey within our country which favours small and medium-sized cities and isolated settlements as opposed to large urbanization processes.

Its purpose is basically to emphasise the 60% of the territory that is not taken up by large metropolitan areas and in which only 25% of the population lives, while the remaining 75% is in the cities…

M.C.: This relationship between the land and its inhabitants, between settlements and nature, between new architectures and historical traditions, is very interesting.

From here it is necessary to start again without pre-established recipes. It is for this reason, I preferred to identify with my collaborators, out of 650 architectural firms contacted, 65 projects that will be

exhibited as a sort of representative sample of the state of the art of our profession in relation to minor Italian centres. Alongside this selection work, I have identified five places to “redefine”, where until now the criticalities have been relevant, precisely because I would like it to be more of a “laboratory” Biennale than an exhibition space for completed works, like a sorting of many project types present in other realities of our country.

A.C.: Basically five projects whose results could prove useful in solving some similar problems: The recovery of the Consagra Theater in Gibellina; the reconstruction after the earthquake in Camerino in Sicily, where the historical center is completely uninhabitable; the Casa della Salute designed for Ottana, in Sardinia, known for its lack of industrial development; a new project, a sawmill, to develop the economy of the Casentino forests, between Emilia Romagna and Tuscany, whilst ensuring that this also takes into account the upkeep of the woods; the abandoned railway stations of Ferrandina and Grassano in the area of Matera.

M.C.: Small interventions that can be seen as signs that it is possible to intervene with a reformist logic without exceeding self-referential symbolic and aesthetic languages. I have always tried to work according to a model that takes into account all the processes of technological innovation using old, but above all new materials, without forgetting, however, that architecture is a language in a rich and “full” context of authors and work that already builds the grammar and syntax of our territory.

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Participating in Gibellina Nuova, Trapani 14/01/2018: a notebook page from the artist Hu-Be

I have always tried to work according to a model that takes into account all the processes of technological innovation using old, but above all new materials, without forgetting, however, that architecture is a language in a rich and “full� context of authors and work that already builds the grammar and syntax of our territory.

From the top clockwise: Belice: the creation of Burri in Old Gibellina Belice: the spatiality of the never completed Teatro di Consagra in Gibellina Nuova Photo by Davide Curatola Soprana (Urban Reports) Sketch of the itineraries by Mario Cucinella

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On the right, participating in Gibellina Nuova, Trapani 14/01/2018: the artist Hu-Be at work inside the Consagra Theater

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Render Tesa 2, Sala dell’Arcipelago

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Alongside this selection work, I have identified five places to “redefine”, where until now the criticalities have been relevant, precisely because I would like it to be more of a “laboratory” Biennale than an exhibition space for completed works, like a sorting of many project types present in other realities of our country.

Third workshop for the elaboration of the five architectural proposals.

Bologna: one of the team at work with Mario Cucinella and Massimo Alvisi

On the left, detail of the model, “Sala degli itinerari”

It isn’t a coincidence that the five tables on which it will be possible to read the projects have been designed by Cucinella himself and made of Riva 1920 in solid wood.

They appear within the Pavilion as floating islands suspended in air, each of which has its own morphology, different from all the others, but in any case recognizable as

belonging to the same history. Architecture and design presented as a language of difference: design unity is always the result of differences, never of a replicable identity in each place.

Italy is an archipelago where every island is at the same time, singular and also part of a whole.

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Participating in Gibellina Nuova, Trapani 14/01/2018

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BY GIANLUIGI RICUPERATI

KATHELIN GRAY

BURROUGHS’ FRIEND

William Burroughs

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- How did he seem up close?

- Like a continent: it is difficult to define him in just a few words. He was a man of extraordinarily formal ways, but endowed with an almost extraterrestrial humor.

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Without him I would never have possessed the freedom and courage it takes to embark on such absurd and ambitious undertakings. His was a continuous investigation of the human mind and the technology of life.

Former confidant of William Burroughs and muse of both Keith Jarrett and Ornette Coleman, the 67-year-old Kathelin Gray is a wonderful witness to the recent decades of culture’s secret history.

The sense of experimentation and dialogue between disciplines that characterised the mental atmosphere of the 1960s remains in her work as a visionary producer and from her work with the scientific ship Eraklitus and Biosphere, the planetary biopark in Arizona.

Gianluigi Ricuperati: Your life resembles a kind of Thousand and One Nights of cultural travel: how did you meet with these extraordinary and different personalities?

Kathelin Gray: My father taught Computer Sciences at Stanford in the 1940s. My mother was a curious intellectual: one of her best friends was Neal Cassady. As a child I breathed the nonconformist air of San Francisco of that time. But the fundamental moment was in 1966, when my parents left me alone on the West Coast to move to New York.

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G.R.: How old were you?

K.G.: I was fifteen. It was from there that everything started: I was the right age and it was the right time to experiment. I loved music and played the piano: the first time a friend made me listen to a record by Cecil Taylor I became enchanted. Strange things happened at the concerts. One time, we went to listen to a band: I was in the front row and I wore the famous Indian symbol that was adopted by so many Western youngsters after ’67 and so the drummer noticed me, and at the end of the concert he invited me to go up on stage. He told

me: ‘I’ll introduce you to someone you’ll get along with: his name is Keith and he’s a pianist’. He was Keith Jarrett. And so began a long friendship that even led me to help him record his famous record with the music of Gurdjieff.

G.R.: Gurdjieff the esotericist?

K.G.: These extremely rare scores of compositions came into our possession.

The followers of Gurdjieff existed in a strange and mysterious cosmos: so at the end of the 1970s, I found myself in Paris asking permission to record that music for ECM, in the beautiful house of Gurdjieff’s most important student, the Swiss-French mystic, Jeanne De Salzmann.

G.R.: When did you meet Burroughs?

K.G.: It was little earlier, in 1974. We had started to work with some friends on a kind of sanctuary of ideas, out in the desert, on the ranch in Santa Fe, where we still live today. William Burroughs was among the personalities we invited there.

G.R.: What were your first impressions?

K.G.: I expected to meet Dr. Benway from Nova Express or the disturbing author dressed in a raincoat that was in all the photos that were circulating at the time.

When the flight landed, seeing no one dressed like that, I thought he had stood us up: until I finally realized that at the back of the waiting room, with a very ordinary suitcase, shorts and wearing a touristic shirt, there was a man who looked a lot like the author of Naked Lunch. We got into the car and the first thing he asked was that we go and buy vodka and cocacola.

K G.R.: Is that a true story?

K.G.: I asked him one day, while we were there in New Mexico, during that first meeting, in fact it was thanks to my curiosity that our friendship was born, because for some reason the innocence or the vagueness of my words managed to break his astonishing impenetrability. He looked at me and burst into tears. Hugging me very tightly, he said that his wife loved him very much, that he would never want to hurt her, and that the accident was the worst thing that had ever happened to him.

From that moment something clicked between us and we didn’t separate until he died.

G.R.: How was Burroughs’ relationship with money?

K.G.: Everyone thinks Burroughs came from a wealthy family, and in fact he had a kind of income, but it was not that much: it was a myth that circulated around, and he enjoyed giving it credence. The reality is

that Burroughs never earned much with his books, and in general he wasn’t very good with money. Things really only changed in the last ten years, when he become a pop culture legend and rock stars invited him to work with them. After the death of Gysin, his inspiring artist friend, he began to paint and certainly, the paintings earned more than the experimental novels. He always told me he made more money with that well-known Nike commercial that portrayed him as a living myth than with all the artistic achievements of his lifetime.

G.R.: What particularly struck him about that visit to the Southwestern United States in 1974?

K.G.: The fact that we were very close to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. It was a fundamental element of the imagination of those years, and it was also a fundamental element of the pervasive dystopia that drove his personal imagination.

G.R.: What remains of Burroughs in you, twenty years after his death?

K.G.: There’s some part of Burroughs in all of us, I think: he was a water diviner.

That is why he liked the desert. Without him I would never have possessed the freedom and courage it takes to embark on such absurd and ambitious undertakings as Eraklitus or Biosphere. His was a continuous investigation of the human mind and the technology of life. I still have a painting that he gave me, two hands on a silvery background that look to the stars.

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G.R.: How did he seem up close?

K.G.: Like a continent: it is difficult to define him in just a few words. He was a man of extraordinarily formal ways, but endowed with an almost extraterrestrial humor, as if he saw things from the point of view of a reptile or a strange animal. He did not love people much, and I thought he had a problem especially with women, a problem of misogyny, perhaps due to the famous accident with his wife. In 1951 a young Burroughs and his wife, in the throes of drugs and alcohol, were playing ‘William Tell’ and she died from a shot fired by his gun.

BY ELENA ARZANI

GIOVANNI ALLEVI FROM TRADITION TO CONTEMPORARY CLASSICAL MUSIC I

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The holder of a brilliant career spanning twenty years, distinguished by an imaginative split with tradition, Giovanni Allevi has conquered the international music scene, winning not only awards and garnering honors everywhere, but above all developing a modern artistic language. By overcoming initial criticisms from the academic world, the pianist and composer has redrawn the boundaries of the genre, creating a “contemporary classical music� and in doing so has laid foundations for current experimentation and a future freer from doctrines.

Giovanni Allevi, Cervaiole quarry, Monte Altissimo, Seravezza.

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His compositions do not deny the classical secular traditions, on the contrary they are enriched and interpenetrated by current sound experiences, influenced by the mixture of rock and pop genres. These stylistic choices can find parallels with those implemented in sculpture which, although requiring a strict academic knowledge of aesthetic, geometrical and mathematical parameters, allow an artist to continually re-interpret them. The architecture of the sound of new conception is inserted in urban contexts by the heterogeneous public, without disconnecting from the lustre of the theatre.

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Giovanni Allevi with Paolo Carli, president of Henraux Photo Veronica Gaido

Elena Arzani: It surprised us to discover that the history of your family is linked to a theme that is particularly close to our hearts: that of stone and its workmanship. Could you tell us how? Perhaps you can remember a particular anecdote about it?

Giovanni Allevi: My ancestors worked for generations in the travertine quarries in the Acquasantano, in the province of Ascoli Piceno, where I was born. As a child I listened to the stories of my relatives concerning the hard work in the quarry, on how a steel wire cut the stone, on the dust that gets everywhere.

My father, who was a music teacher, went to see his uncle at the quarry one day. His uncle, surprised to see him asked: “What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be at school?”

“It’s my day off...”

“A day off?! What’s that?”

When I returned to a quarry again on Monte Altissimo, I felt a strong emotion in seeing those dusty boots, those tools, those workers that I felt were a part of me. It is exciting to think that from their hard work a distillate of beauty can be given to the world.

E.A.: Exactly twenty years have passed from 13 Fingers, your first album, produced

by Jovanotti, to Equilibrium, the latest release. I won’t ask you for an evaluation, but more so a comment on how you have seen music, including yours, evolve during this long period and how you think it will evolve in the future.

G.A.: If I can trace some kind of logic in this absurd path, it seems to me that my music has become more and more liberated and has established ever more extensive

The cover of Equilibrium

E.A.: Sixteen records, four books, including a best seller and countless international awards. You seem to be a creative genius with unstoppable energy. Einstein said: “To keep your balance, you must keep moving”.

Is this a sentence that could describe you?

G.A.: I recently found myself reflecting on exactly this sentence by Einstein, and in reading it I felt a certain anxiety. I cannot recognize myself in the challenge to keep moving. I have always needed times of reflection, of silence. I have always given my best after long periods of incubation, in which everything seemed completely still.

E.A.: On the cover of your album Equilibrium there’s depicted a young protester along with a classical music conductor. This is a perfect representation of your “contemporary classical music” that combines the perfection of formal academic language with a modern style and sounds. This is music that has fascinated very different personalities, including Spike Lee, Pope Francis and Pope Benedict XVI. It has succeeded in approaching a wide heterogeneous public and promoting, at the international level, an interest in the genre.

Do you see yourself in this representation?

G.A.: I would like to add that my face is crossed by a smile on the cover, this was to emphasize the light that I finally reached.

I consider that smile a goal, achieved after a painful journey that led me from

the unconsciousness of the beginning, through moments tormented by darkness.

It is very flattering to think that my work is engineering such important changes, but at the same time I continue to consider myself a humble and tireless creator of music, bent over the score, unaware of the consequences of my actions.

E.A.: Michelangelo gave humanity works of priceless value and beauty and stated that “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the sculptor’s task to discover it”. Similarly, your song No Words was composed to give testament to the intimate pain of the victims of the earthquake in central Italy. What is your creative process? Does it change according to the message linked with a particular composition or is it the same regardless?

G.A.: When you live through the experience of an earthquake from very close by, that trembling movement continues to shake you inside even when the initial shock is over. So in No Words it is as if the music is emanating directly from my body, still trembling the morning after the earthquake. Thinking about it, it’s rare that one of my musical compositions is born from an experience I’ve lived through. Generally the notes reach my mind without an apparent motive.

E.A.: Your recent album was born from your experience on an island in the Atlantic with an old cell phone, far from modern technology. Living in darkness after an eye operation.

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When I returned to a quarry again on Monte Altissimo, I felt a strong emotion in seeing those dusty boots, those tools, those workers that I felt were a part of me.

and complex shapes. While it seems to me that in the rest of the world music is going the diametrically opposite way, that of uniformity and simplification.

My advice is to be aware that when we bring into play our burning passion, tenacity and courage, the rewards will inevitably come, even if everything around us appears motionless.

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Giovanni Allevi during “United for art” concert, an event linked to Volarearte 2013 in collaboration with Rabarama and Vecchiato Art Galleries, Cervaiole quarry

On one hand this was a voluntary choice to be isolated, on the other a consequence of a difficult moment of life. Do you think that the hyperstimulation of new methods of communication can negatively affect a musician’s artistic output?

G.A.: It negatively affects the happiness of people, their serenity. It is because of this that I’m exhausted from the media side of my business, I have begun to believe that being social is a folly. I am convinced that in a distant future, there will be a total inversion of current trends, towards discretion and the recovery of oneself.

E.A.: What does Giovanni Allevi like to do in his spare time? As we are speaking about music, which artists do you listen to, or which artists in general are you passionate about?

G.A.: More and more I love to devote myself to running, a discipline that I face in solitude, without any goal, competition, or for any health reasons. I run to deceive my disquietude and delude myself that it remains behind me, stalking; to think, or better said, to let the thoughts flow and observe them from every angle. As for music, due to being perpetually immersed in it, I sometimes prefer to listen to silence.

E.A.: At the age of 28 you gave up everything to devote yourself in body and soul to your passion. Your acclaimed success has confirmed that you made the right choice, it has repaid your efforts.

Your courage and tenacity is a positive example for anyone trying to fulfill their own ambitions. What advice would you give to those who are trying to embark on an equally rash decision?

G.A.: My advice is to be aware that when we bring into play our burning passion, tenacity and courage, the rewards will inevitably come, even if everything around us appears motionless and it seems that nobody is ready to receive our voice.

E.A.: You’ve received the “Cavaliere al Merito” of the Italian Republic, the honor of “Bösendorfer Artist”, the Elsa Morante Ragazzi Award, the America Prize of the Italy USA Foundation as well as many others. How do you deal with all these recognitions, among which, the most curious was having an asteroid dedicated to you?

G.A.: It is impossible for me to become bigheaded, because I aspire to become nothing, at the same time continuing to pursue my dream with all my passion, which is, writing music. For some unknown reason it gives me great comfort to think of being nothing, of leaving no trace of my passage.

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BY MAURIZIO RIVA

WOOD AND MARBLE: NATURE TAKES SHAPE C

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Many of the meeting points between marble and wood, two extraordinary materials, that each embody the ultimate expression of their nature, amaze in always surprising ways.

Nature, above all, transforms, works independently, sometimes leading to those spontaneous and evolutionary cases which lead to good shapes, as discovered by many during the history of the arts.

Nature compels man to evolve, man compels the project to evolve and the project tries to compel nature to evolve and so in this continuous cycle, the searching and the relationships that make nature a system become available to those who know interpret and use them. Nature exists above all as an adjective: natural, bringing forth both spontaneous and logical things, intelligent and beautiful, things with precise function and with a hidden essence.

For Riva 1920, nature is tied to wood with

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its forms, its veins, its scents: it is a history that has lasted for almost a hundred years.

It all began in 1920 in CantĂš, in the heart of Brianza, in a small family-run workshop founded by my grandfather and then passed into the hands of my father. It was inevitable that my brother and I also came to dedicate ourselves to the family business and to date we have worked with more than 1,600 private clients.

A long process of commitment to, and the development of, natural wood, and handcrafting developed over the years.

This became the distinctive feature of Riva 1920 and it was just right that during my trip to New York a fundamental step took place largely, as I had the opportunity to get closer to the culture of the Amish/Shaker religious communities of America. It was a discovery that opened my mind and radically changed my methods of conceiving furniture.

A Riva 1920 craftsman at work

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This was during the 1990s, a period in which working naturally and paying attention to the environment was not a priority or topical issue. I decided to take a risk and I began buying American Cherry wood from reforested areas and only finishing the furniture with oils and waxes of natural origin. In a world crowded with new synthetic materials, it wasn’t easy at first. I guided the company in taking a totally revolutionary position that was in sharp contrast with the trend of the furniture market, fortunately our tenacity over the passing of time has proved me right. A precise design identity began to define itself, an identity that is expressed in a product of top quality and naturalness, through the use of completely natural adhesives, waxes and oils.

Meanwhile, important collaborations with internationally renowned architects started to take place, including Renzo Piano,

Scented Lebanese Cedar

Millenium Kauri from New Zealand marshes

Scented Lebanese Cedar

years ago, trunks cut down by enormous cataclysms during the previous geological eras and returned to the light by the subsoil. Submerged mines of wood that have retained the characteristics of a freshly felled tree.

Reclaimed woods like the briccole, durmast oak poles entrenched in the Venetian lagoon, that serve the purpose of guiding boats and signaling the tides.

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Michele De Lucchi, Karim Rashid, Mario Botta, Paolo Pininfarina, Matteo Thun, Terry Dwan, Alessandro Mendini, Marc Sadler, Mario Bellini, Claudio Bellini and Giuliano Cappelletti. These works marked an evolution in the world of design, a design that was, however, always sustainable.

And that’s why I decided to start using repurposed wood in our collection, wood which has a low impact on the environment. Ancient woods like the Kauri of New Zealand dated from 50,000

work of small mollusks that, feeding on the material, leave traces of their passage.

And finally, fragrant woods like Lebanese Cedar, large trees felled due to landslides, climatic events or planned culls.

The concept of sustainability is always at the very center of our production standards, to be handed down, to never forget that wood is a renewable resource, it is not endless. This is true for all natural material and it is for this reason that everything which is made available to us from nature must be used with the utmost care and respect. These are precious, unrepeatable and unique raw materials (nature never repeats itself), they are honest and authentic.

Design fulfills a primary function: to mould a material, whatever it may be, and to restrain it in a form. It is man who is the heir of this noble task, thanks to craftsmanship combined with the most innovative technologies.

Intensely aromatic cedar wood is processed using ultra modern, five and six-axis machines, using the same type of processing that is used to sculpt marble.

Shaping natural material is always an exciting challenge. Each work returns a creation that has a soul, a soul that contains all the colors of nature.

One product that has been able to harmonize wood with marble, combining the worlds of Riva 1920 and of Henraux, is the Molletta bench designed by Baldessari and Baldessari.

The project was carried out in 2012 and was immediately recognised for its inimitable style, so much so that it became a bestseller for the universally known company, style that is traceable to the

production by Riva 1920. Characterized by a sculptural design that plays with the typical oversized theme found in Pop Art, it no longer fulfills the primary purpose for which it was conceived, but rises to become an iconic piece. Scented Lebanese cedar and marble worked from unique blocks, compose together a commonly used object, the clothes peg, that extends from a morphological solution to a functional one.

A true and real work of art sculpted in nature.

Yes, because nature is the real hero.

The key lies in leaving the raw material as natural as possible. This is a choice aimed at the enhancing and preserving of natural heritage. This is true in the case of Henraux, which has been able to give appropriate value to the area from which it has drawn its fortune, a huge and complicated project involving the adaptation and enhancement of production and of environmental upgrading.

Both companies are also united by the desire to preserve tradition and to pass this tradition on: from this idea was born our company museums coupled with the desire to communicate with professionals working in the sector, such as architects and designers. These companies promote important projects that connect entrepreneurial reality with the worlds of art, architecture, design, culture and which also touch on social conscience, sustainability and the care for the environment, whilst also paying great attention to the future for young people.

It can no longer be a matter of doing business alone, the desire is to promote the culture of materials and the beauty.

Molletta bench in statuary Macchietta marble and scented Lebanese cedar wood.

Design by Baldessari and Baldessari

A processing phase

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BY COSTANTINO PAOLICCHI

MONTE ALTISSIMO, STILL AT THE FOREFRONT OF GREAT CINEMA

The director KonÄ?alovskij with an operator during the shooting of the film

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The Sin, a film inspired by the life of Michelangelo Buonarroti during the period 1516-1520, following the sculptor as he struggled trying to obtain the marble he needed from the quarries of Carrara and Seravezza.

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The actor Alberto Testone in the role of Michelangelo

In the summer of 2017, Monte Altissimo hosted various scenes of Russian Director Andrej Končalovskij’s latest project The Sin, a film inspired by the life of Michelangelo Buonarroti during the period 1516-1520, following the sculptor as he struggled trying to obtain the marble he needed from the quarries of Carrara and Seravezza.

This last year Henraux celebrated the fifth centenary of the first ascent by Michelangelo on Monte Altissimo. In January 1517 the sculptor first climbed the mountain, located in the Municipality of Seravezza, which since 1821 has belonged to the Henraux Society. The Altissimo and its marble, have attracted many great sculptors over the centuries following Michelangelo’s time. Take Giambologna, for example, who in 1568 used the first block of statuary marble extracted from the newly opened quarries to create Victory, which is today displayed at the museum of the Bargello; then Vincenzo Danti and Vasari, the American Hiram Powers in the mid-nineteenth century and the French

Auguste Rodin in the early twentieth century; up to the English sculptor Henry Moore in the 1960s, at which time the Henraux company led by Erminio Cidonio created an international centre for contemporary sculpture in Querceta.

Buonarroti had established close relations with the quarrymen of Carrara since the time of the Pietà, but these relationships failed in exactly in the year, 1517. This collapse came about because in Carrara it was feared that the opening of new quarries would damage the centuries-old monopoly held over the city’s marble.

At that point, one of the most difficult and tormented periods of Michelangelo’s entire life began. This was in part due to the sculptor’s working with Della Rovere and with Pope Leo X to create two enormous works at the same time: the tomb of Giulio II and the façade of the San Lorenzo Florentine basilica.

In the late spring of 2010, Končalovskij contacted me by telephone to convey his intentions to make a film about the life of Michelangelo in the aforementioned

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During filming: the transportation scene Foto di Sasha Gusov Courtesy Jean Vigo Italia Andrei KonÄ?alovskij Studios

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During filming: the transportation scene Foto di Sasha Gusov Courtesy Jean Vigo Italia Andrei KonÄ?alovskij Studios

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“What I would like to convey” – he said – “is not only the essence of the person called Michelangelo, but also the flavors and odors of that era, full of inspiration and beauty, but also of bloody and merciless moments.

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Opposite, Končalovskij with the President of Henraux Paolo Carli

period. This idea was inspired by the book I wrote in 2005 (Michelangelo. Sogni di marmo, Bandecchi & Vivaldi Ed.): he had received a copy as a gift from some Russian friends in Forte dei Marmi and he had become smitten. By September he had already sent two screenwriters to Versilia (one of these was Stanislav Günter from Berlin), who were in charge of making the initial checks of the locations where the film was to be set. After visiting the quarries of Carrara (Cava Sponda, Polvaccio, Ravaccione etc.), they were convinced that these places would have difficulty in providing the locations for some scenes of the film, because the natural environment was so damaged by excavations, to the point of no longer being able to convey the appearance of places set in the second decade of the sixteenth century. I then accompanied them to the quarries of Seravezza, Trambiserra, Cappella and finally to Monte Altissimo. They had an incredibly positive impression there, additionally because the requirements of the director called for locations that suggested a nature that was still wild and intact and with a strong emotional impact emanating from the steepness of the mountain and the visual drama of the landscape opening up to the horizon of the sea. These were requirements that Monte Altissimo succeeds in filling to a great degree.

Four years ago, at the start of the summer, after several exchanges of letters, I met Končalovskij in Pietrasanta and spent nearly three days with him, revisiting the Carrara quarries -– which the director already knew – and also accompanying him on Monte Altissimo with the invaluable technical contribution of Henraux. Halting in various places, from Polla to the Mossa quarry, the director submitted to me an endless series of precise, timely questions about issues relating to historical character or problems pertaining to the technologies regarding the extraction and transport of marble. In August 2016 Končalovskij sent

me the first draft of the script for the film The Sin, which was rapidly entering the production and organization phase.

The director reiterated several times that it was not his intention to make a “documentary” on Michelangelo and on the quarries, but a film. More truthfully, a work of art, that was framed in a precise historical period which allowed it to follow a unique and creative path. This would keep it in line with his artistic vocation and the “visionary” character of his previous works. Character that was especially apparent in his recent productions that were awarded with the Leone d’Oro and the Leone d’Argento in Venice. “What I would like to convey” – he said – “is not only the essence of the person called Michelangelo, but also the flavors and smells of that era, full of inspiration and beauty, but also of bloody and merciless moments. The poetry of the film intertwines the barbarism that is always present with the marvelous ability of the human eye to see the inexhaustible beauty of the world, and of man to transmit this to future generations”.

The initial operational contact was established with the set designer (Maurizio Sabatini, who has won numerous awards including the David di Donatello in 2013 for best scenic design for the film La migliore offerta) and also with the casting directors and with Italian production managers (Jean Vigo Italia). These contacts have intensified since the beginning of last spring, the period when Končalovskij and his collaborators carried out new location scouting on Monte Altissimo, followed by negotiations and agreements with Henraux Spa and the Henraux Foundation for the management of complicated issues concerning the setting up of various sets on Altissimo, close to the Mossa quarry, in the canal known as the “Black Cabin”, in a stretch of the ancient “via di lizza” of the Macchietta and Fitta quarries, and finally in Cervaiole.

And so, over forty years later, the sequences

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of quarries featured in the famous film The Agony and The Ecstasy by director Carol Reed (1965) starring Rex Harrison in the part of Julius II and Charlton Heston in the part of Michelangelo, also shot on Monte Altissimo, the celebrated mountain saw, for few months, a flurry of activity from technicians, vehicles, workers, actors and extras for Andrej Končalovskij’s film about Michelangelo.

The stunning scenography by Maurizio Sabatini; the exceptional casting of professional actors, but above all of numerous non-professional actors, chosen among the quarrymen and the people of Carrara and Versilia; the beautiful costumes and the weighty organisational machinations have aroused admiration and, in some moments of filming also intense emotions. The portrayal of the quarry work, using the current real life heroes of the Carrara quarries, Alberto Testone’s incredible resemblance to Michelangelo, the participation of many extras in the role of commoners (demonstrated – in an event that actually occurred once – when a young quarryman, in one of the most dramatic scenes of the film, is killed during a spectacular phase of transportation), the sight of numerous faithfully reconstructed wagons and pairs of oxen, left enduring memories for those who were involved in various roles, but especially for those lucky few who were able to watch the filming.

The film produced by the “Andrei Končalovskij Foundation for support of Cinema and Scenic Arts” and by “Jean Vigo Italia” with Rai Cinema will be ready around June 2018.

In the meantime, Henraux is glad and proud to have contributed to the completion of this important work by the Russian director and wishes much well-deserved success to this Italian-Russian production, to the technicians, actors and to all those who have played a role in the film’s production.

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BY ANDREA TENERINI

THE REPRISAL OF THE EXCAVATION ON MOUNT ALTISSIMO DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

FEATURED IN THE WORK OF THE SWISS PAINTER JEAN CHARLES MÃœLLER I

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in the opening, the vasajone quarry, a watercolor by Jean Charles MĂźller, 1821 (fig 1)

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At the top, the route of the vasajone quarry in a watercolor

by Jean Charles MĂźller M with an indicated date of 1821 although it is believed that it was completed a few years later

and provide precious marble to the main studies of sculpture and embellishment in Italy and also beyond the Alps. To promote the product at the reopening of the quarries, a series of complementary activities were almost immediately undertaken, the publication of articles in the European press concerning the progress of the works, the opening of a sculpture studio in Seravezza and a period of sending letters to the greatest sculptors of the period, exhorting them to experiment with the high quality material extracted from Monte Altissimo, considered – as Borrini himself wrote to Berthel Thorvaldsen in March 1821 – by the “Divine Michel-Agniolo [...] the only one which could replace the beautiful statuary that in ancient times was excavated in the exhausted Cava del Polvaccio in Carrara2.”

Within the Borrini and Henraux project, aimed at the propaganda and the dissemination of the myth of the Apuane quarries it is possible to also include the mandate received from Müller to illustrate some moments of the activities managed by them. Born in Lausanne in 1768, Müller moved to Italy twenty years later, settling in Naples and Rome. Having moved to Paris during the years of the Consulate, he established a solid friendship with Luigi Angiolini, who was at the time in charge of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. In approximately 1809, he returned to Italy with him and settled in Seravezza, the city

The purpose was to start a company that was able to counter the Carrara monopoly and provide precious marble to the main studies of sculpture and embellishment in Italy and also beyond the Alps.

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Le marbre qu’on en extrait, sous être absolument sans taches, ce qui ne se savoir jamais vu, sont infiniment plus beaux que ceux de Carrare1. In this manner, in a letter sent from Seravezza to Florence on October 13, 1822, the Swiss painter Jean Charles Müller informed Luisetta, the young daughter of his friend and protector Luigi Angiolini, who had recently died, of the news concerning the quarries of Monte Altissimo. Müller was particularly up-todate with the events related to the reprisal of the marble extraction activity, started a few years earlier by Marco Borrini and Jean Baptiste Alexandre Henraux, not only because he was a friend and client of both, but also because he was involved in the creation of a series of paintings of work in the quarry, probably under direct request of the former.

Thanks to his position as a well-appointed State official at court, Borrini managed to obtain a substantial loan for the reconstruction of the marble road and the reopening of some mining sites. To do so he formed a business partnership with Henraux, a Napoleonic officer who arrived in Carrara with the task of managing the purchase and sending of marble blocks to Paris and, after the fall of Bonaparte, was an agent of Louis XVIII involved in the retrieval of material for sculpture works in Italy.

The purpose was to start a company that was able to counter the Carrara monopoly

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of origin of Angiolini, and collaborated in the administration of family assets. On the death of his patron and after the marriage of Luisetta, the artist moved to Florence and opened a studio attended by the leading exponents of Italian and European nobility and bourgeoisie. Interested in composing a pictorial journey of Tuscany, Müller journeyed to the Maremma where

in 1832 “he died a sudden touch of death, in his own buggy, on the road that leads from Manciano to Pitigliano3.” After the painter disappeared, and with thanks to the intervention of some friends, several of the drawings were printed in an album, published in 1835 with the title Pictorial journey in the Tuscan Maremme and on the island of Elba4. After the 1840s the

Above and to the right, the transportation phase in the quarry of Vasajone in two watercolors of Jean Charles Müller, 1821 (figs 2 and 3)

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View of the Ravaccione quarries in Carrara during the lining of the marble block for the construction of the sculpture of Louis XIII in a watercolor by Jean Charles Müller, 1821

The works depict two of the most important episodes which occurred at the turn of the early 1820s on the Apuan Alps: the reopening of the quarries of Monte Altissimo and the shipment of marble for the construction of Louis XIII’s sculpture by Jean -Pierre Cortot, modeled

by Charles Dupaty. The original drawings relating to the Apuane Versiliesi, made by Müller in 1821, illustrate the work in the quarries of Vasajone, at the time of the reprisal of the work on Monte Altissimo and the “lizzatura” of a block of marble (the transportation of blocks from the quarry on large sleds). The first view shows the central part of the quarry, in full activity, with about thirty quarrymen and stonemasons busy extracting and squaring the blocks while on the left two characters are seated, talking, probably to be identified as Borrini and Henraux. The

The works depict two of the most important episodes which occurred at the turn of the early 1820s on the Apuan Alps: the reopening of the quarries of Monte Altissimo and the shipment of marble for the construction of Louis XIII’s sculpture.

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figure of Müller progressively became forgotten and probably before the end of the century, his many works composed on the mountains of Versilia and Carrara became scattered. Fortunately, before the disappearance of the collection, which belonged largely to Borrini, a photograph of some of the watercolors made by the painter was handed over to the Marseilles mining engineer Louis Laurent Simonin, the author of a long report of a visit to the Apuan quarries in December 1863, published the following year, without images, in the prestigious Parisian magazine Revue des Deux Mondes5. The reprint of the text in 1869, within the sumptuous volume Les pierres. Esquisses minéralogiques6 allowed Simonin to publish five full-page woodcuts engraved by Charles Laplante. drawn, as the captions note, from Müller’s unpublished watercolors.

The operation of extraction, displacement and shipping, managed directly by Henraux and which lasted half a decade, was the most challenging episode concerning the Apuan quarries in this period between the second and third decade of the 19th century

second print depicts the area dedicated to the storage of semi-finished goods and, in the distance, the Via di Lizza, with a piece of marble depicted making its descent.

The third image shows a front view of the same block, while being transported down.

A woodcut very similar to this; depicting the transport of the same element seen a few moments later, and which we can hypothesize is an unused piece which comes from the group of works owned by Simonin, was inserted the following year in encyclopedic dictionaries printed in Germany and in Italy, illustrating the entry relating to the Apennines7.

The remaining two pieces from the works of the Swiss painter that were published in 1869 depict, as expected, an incident which occurred in Carrara in 1823: the transport, from the Ravaccione quarries to the beach of Avenza, of the gigantic marble block used for the equestrian statue of Louis XIII, which stands today in the Place des Vosges in Paris.

The operation of extraction, displacement and shipping, managed directly by Henraux and which lasted half a decade, was the most challenging episode

concerning the Apuan quarries in this period between the second and third decade of the 19th century. This single shipment is still considered today to be the largest block ever carried across the Alps. Thanks to the references to the Müller illustration contained in Simonin’s book, it is possible to attribute another drawing to the Swiss Artist. Now kept at the Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen, and known as Ship loading Marble Blocks at the edge of the Sea at Carrara8, often published with a fanciful reference to another, Flemish artist of the 18th century.

As can be seen in this case, the image reproduced by Simonin and the design of the Danish gallery not only represent the same subject, but were completed in a very narrow time interval, both demonstrate the great qualities of the author, whose speed of strokes never failed, the incisiveness in depicting – through the contrasts of the design and the choice of the point of view both – the complexity of the subject, the vast landscape and the pivotal nature of the small gestures of humanity which composed them. Unlike the works made on the beach of Avenza, in the real

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Carrara beach during the loading of marble in a watercolor

by Jean Charles Müller, 1821

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illustrations made on the Apuan alps, the choice of perspective seems tense, not so much to mark the immediacy and authenticity of the vision, as to try to depict in the best way the essential completeness of what is visible. Engaged in a search for meticulous calligraphic and topographical restitutions of places, the passionate spirit of Müller is diluted in these works and the naturalness and genuineness of his vision – recognizable in his series of Maremma landscapes and in the few other known works – give way to a most definite didascalic style.

The difficulties encountered by the artist in creating the drawings on the quarries are also well documented in a passage contained in another letter, also sent to Luisetta Angiolini, July 7, 1822, where Müller confesses: “Je continue toujours l’ouvrage de l’Altissimo, mais les sortes de sujets là sont froid a epeinter (sic). Les compositions, ou les cites bien choisis d’aprés nature, me sont bien plus agreeable à faire.”9 Ninety years ago Augusto Dalgas printed photographs of the original illustrations

comprising three of the five works included in Simonin’s text, in a volume focusing on Versilia in the series L’Italia artistica10 without a single reference to the original artist. In the same text, Dalgas published a watercolor depicting the transport of a block of marble with the caption: “One of the first blocks excavated from M. Altissimo in the quarries of Cav. Borrini (from a painting by the artist Müller located in the Borrini house)”.

This is, at the present time, the only other known credit, found in the body of images created by the artist from Lausanne on the Apuane. A body, whose originals are today unfortunately, as we have seen, almost completely lost. A group of scenes that, from a purely artistic value, blend priceless historical and documentary value, scenes made from the intertwining relationships between industry and art, a subject that is still being explored today and, for this reason we hope, have not been destroyed and, perhaps may soon re-emerge from the oblivion to which, for over a century they have been confined.

1 Bagni Amadei Archive, Seravezza, Letter of Jean Charles Müller to Luisetta Angiolini, Seravezza, October 13 1822.

2 Thorvaldsen Museum Archive, Copenhagen, Lettera di Marco Borrini a Berthel Thorvaldsen, Seravezza, March 4 1821 (the letter is erroneously archived with the date March 4, 1825).

3 X [Gino Capponi], Carlo Müller, in “Antologia”, XLVI, 1832, pp. 238-239.

4 Viaggio pittorico nelle Maremme Toscane e all’Isola d’Elba disegnato da Carlo Müller pittore paesista svizzero inciso e pubblicato da Fortunato de Fournier, Firenze, 1835.

5 Louis Laurent Simonin, Les marbres de l’Altissimo et de Carrare, in “Revue des Deux Mondes”, 52, 1er Juillet 1864, pp. 125-161.

6 Louis Laurent Simonin, Les pierres.

Esquisses minéralogiques, Paris, 1869.

7 In Germany, for example, Charakter der modenensischen nordapenninen beim marmorbruch Vasajone am Monte Altissimo was published in the first volume of Illustriertes Konversations-Lexikon printed in Leipzig in 1870 (collection 779-780).

8 Anonymous (Jean Charles Müller), Ship loading Marble Blocks at the edge of the Sea at Carrara, Thorvaldsen Museum, Copenhagen, Inv. D906. It is a work on paper the size of 43x56cm, made using charcoal, pen, brush, ink and white chalk.

9 Bagni Amadei Archive, Seravezza, Lettera di Jean Charles Müller a Luisetta Angiolini, Seravezza, July 7 1822.

10 Augusto Dalgas, La Versilia, Bergamo, 1928.

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Jean Charles Müller, watercolor, 1821, detail

BY ALDO COLONETTI

LUCE DI CARRARA SHOWROOM: MULTIPLE FUNCTIONS FOR MULTIPLE IDENTITIES P

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The old Henraux sawmill, built around 1890, is like a kind of watchful eye, observing the flow of movement of the marble blocks that come from the Apuane, before leaving again from the same gate, to the world, after having been worked, shaped and redesigned.

The sawmill has always been, despite the different functions that have been hosted, the hinge between the “interior” and the “exterior” of the company. It is from this

concept that the decision to entrust the renovation project to Marco Casamonti was made. It marks, in respect of the structure and the external texture of the building, the fact that history is able to speak to the contemporaries if it is interpreted through the current aesthetic language.

Henraux is a company that designs and works on three fronts: architecture, design through Luce di Carrara and

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Render of the new showroom Luce di Carrara,

by Studio Archea, Firenze

Render of the new showroom Luce di Carrara,

by Studio Archea, Firenze

Architects can be divided into two main categories: The first are very professional designers who respect the rules of the game, they try to define their identity with the different movements and solicitations that come from cultural and design debate. And there

are architects who have always turned their gaze towards other disciplines, from design to material culture, from theoretical research, which perhaps also includes editing international magazines, to organising exhibitions.

They are especially curious about any change that comes from the world of applied research, and therefore from production, without ever forgetting that the form of any artifact represents the imprinting of one’s identity.

Marco Casamonti remains in the second category, for his cultural acquaintances, because contemporary art is part of his history and family dna, because he has edited, and edits, international magazines such as Area, but above all because the relationship between project and industrial system, on applied research plans, has always accompanied him in every professional ventures.

As Casamonti himself points out: “The architect or designer can respond to the different needs of the client outside of the established schemes, through the support of industrial realities that have not lost the quality craftsmanship which allows many component manufacturers for architecture, to creatively interpret particularly complicated themes and projects, especially from the technological point of view”.

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art with the Foundation. Of these strategic areas of Made in Italy, marble remains at the center as the absolute protagonist, it was necessary to tell and present these very different but highly complementary identities. The interior space, designed by Casamonti, allows for a series of exhibition activities and also work and meeting spaces: an empty area in the center and around the internal perimeter of the building the stairs developed and lead to a catwalk, which also allows access to the upper floor.

This is a flexible project but built around some fixed points: respect for the pre-existing architecture and the definition of a new space that uses all the verticality of the old sawmill. This allows the visitor different points of view, which are fundamental when we talk about the volumes and surfaces that derive from the infinite variables of nature because marble is an expression of “artifice and nature”.

The future of a project lies completely within this openness towards the individual dimension, mainly attributable to the territory and the skills of the craftsman, which are however, refused under all the new rules that derive from innovative production processes, from the dialogue between different disciplines.

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Render del nuovo showroom Luce di Carrara, progetto Studio Archea, Firenze

This is one of the fundamental characteristics of Casamonti, what he himself defines as “the extraordinary”, which involves responding to the requests of the client, but it could also be participation in a competition that poses “extraordinary” design questions, and always being able to find a meaningful solution.

The transition from one dimension to another or from one material to another is possible only if one can assume a flexible attitude, if one is capable of identifying the potential of a form, of a compositional language, as of a material and other expressive possibilities. One of Marco Casamonti’s best projects is the Bargino winery for the Antinori family, in San Casciano Val di Pesa: “A new way to live and dwell the earth: more than 500 meters of underground roads, parking lots that can not be seen, thousands of square meters of maneuvering and working areas situated more than 15 meters below the level of the hill. Everything is as if it had always existed, using materials such as terracotta and corten steel combined with a series of cements which have the tonality of the earth”, explains Marco.

Here, however, the idea is developed, when the need arises to design a bookcase on which you can also collect memories, photographs or any objects that you do not want to forget. A series of prototypes are considered regarding the design for the interior of the cellar, and from here a real modular system is designed in terracotta for Moroso, a Terreria: a bookcase made of earth: “Architecture

and design intertwine, without any distinction of scale, together putting into play the chromatism, the tactility which ceramics has made available for domestic use over the centuries, shifting from the roughness of terracotta to the sheen of different glazes”.

But it’s not finished. When Casamonti meets Paolo Carli, president of Henraux, to discuss a series of projects, in particular the renovation of a production building located within the main premises in Querceta, to transform it into a cultural and institutional presentation, he immediately develops another design concept. Whilst still respecting the first idea, linked to the cellar: he changes the material, he uses marble, and in so doing, the Terreria has been transformed into a modular system for a new bookcase, a Marmeria, in doing so, he demonstrates that being flexible always leads to finding the “main thrust”, even in differing projects.

The same philosophy is always evident, from earth to marble to wood: “When Itlas, a company known for processing wood for floors and walls, called me to design objects and systems, I thought that to begin with, the fundamental rule was that a new path should be one born of respect for the material on the one hand, and on the other of the possibility of thinking it in a new way, of investigating its unexpressed potential.

Massive wood has an extraordinary strength: it is always different in respect of design seriality. From this is born a

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Render of the new showroom Luce di Carrara,

by Studio Archea, Firenze

series of solid wood washbasins, dug from the timber, a newspaper rack that also collects wood and the boards that separate them, “allowing a comfortable grip, a lamp, a tray, a flower vase”.

Behind all these projects, my gaze beyond your disciplinary boundaries leads you to new experiences. It must never be forgotten that the ultimate destination of an object as a piece of architecture must always be “the person”, and not the architect’s narcissism.

“As Paul Valery writes”, Casamonti points out, “a work speaks to us and conveys particular sensations and stimuli, each of which belongs to a single individual. If we accept this hypothesis, that is namely the overlapping of judgments, experiences and activities, we can not fail to recognize that the value of differences that opposes trivialization and expresses clearly how meaningless

the dissemination of an international taste that rejects cultural differences, which mortifies the specific identity and which does not enhance local traditions”.

The future of a project lies completely within this openness towards the individual dimension, mainly attributable to the territory and the skills of the craftsman, which are however, refused under all the new rules that derive from innovative production processes, from the dialogue between different disciplines that contribute to the definition of “things” and “relationships”, knowing that natural materials like marble, wood and ceramics have always existed, even if they lie constantly in wait for someone able to interpret them in different ways from all the others.

Herein lies the value of “difference”, and Marco Casamonti belongs here.

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“999 UNA COLLEZIONE DI DOMANDE SULL’ABITARE CONTEMPORANEO” EXHIBITION AT THE MILAN TRIENNALE

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“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember.

I do and I understand”, Confucius And this is precisely what the exhibition 999 Una collezione di domande sull’abitare contemporaneo (999 A collection of questions on contemporary living) held at the Milan Triennale from 12th January to 2nd April 2018 invited us to do: watch, touch, try.

A large exhibition based on living that was structured first and foremost as a large house, with its various environments, situations, activities and relationships.

This house was not intended as place, but, instead as an experience: as a program of Italian realities flanked by international guests, it involved the public in an interactive and participatory

way, thanks to a series of physical, digital and social settings.

Visitors were invited to make a real journey into the home of a future that was made in the present, moving from one environment to another and interacting in first-person with a whole series of new ways of “living”. A dwelling that opens to the world, a house that becomes a city which welcomes different forms and ways of living.

In this context, Luce di Carrara, in conjunction with the BBMDS architecture and design studio, wanted to explore the basic concept of “home”, as a space intended to be lived in, but which is not only limited to this activity. It is also as a receptacle of experiences, stories and

memory, made unique by those who live there. The house was presented as a module - repeatable in its form but never the same in substance - and from its replicas, villages, towns, cities are born.

999 mini marble houses were created from this meditation, each one different, unique, not replicable, complete with its own personality: 999 mini houses exhibited in a series to create an ideal urban model. A reproduction of an essential shape, an iconic design object, the project presented at the Milan Triennale was made unique by the use of marble, a noble and precious material that gives its essence to even the most minute object.

At the end of the exhibition, the 999 mini marble houses were numbered and will be put on sale. The proceeds will go to the activities that ActionAid carries out in Central Italy, through the SIS.M.I.CO. project, supporting the communities affected by the earthquake. A small gesture that has great value. Off the scale, just like the 999 mini houses made of marble.

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MILAN, SATURDAY 18 NOVEMBER 2017 PERMANENT PLACING OF THE SCULPTURE IL SEME DELL’ALTISSIMO

BY EMILIO ISGRÒ AT THE MILAN TRIENNALE

Processing of plant Il Seme dell’Altissimo at Henraux

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Emilio Isgrò’s seed is majestic, developed to be one billion and five hundred million times larger than its original size. A sevenmetre high sculpture made by Henraux in white Altissimo marble, taken from the Cervaiole quarry on Monte Altissimo.

The sculpture, composed of two 250 cm high, and one 200 cm high elements, was created from two blocks of cm 540x170x195 and 250x140x190.

The completion of the work required about two months of work, time during which, under the supervision of Isgrò, the workers and technicians of Henraux were able to transform the artist’s thought into marble.

The work rests on a circular pavement of 15 meters in diameter, made of Versilys, a precious grey marble, also sourced from Monte Altissimo, into which, the inscriptions imagined by Isgrò in support

Emilio Isgro and Filippo Del Corno, the Culture Councilor of Milan, next to the sculpture

of the work have been inlaid in Cardoso stone.

The artist, of Sicilian origin but Milanese by adoption, has chosen a subject closely linked to the Mediterranean and his land.

The history of this seed in fact started in 1998 in the commune of Barcellona in Sicily where Isgrò created the Protoseme, a giant sculpture fibreglass, a cheap material, inserted in a sumptuous context of lava and volcanic waste. A seed that split the earth to be seen, perfectly interpreted the central theme of Expo 2015, “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life”, an exhibition for which in 2015 Henraux created the work intending from the beginning in agreement with the artist, its subsequent donation to the city of Milan.

During the 2015 Expo, Il Seme dell’Altissimo, the only monumental work in marble present, was placed at the main entrance of Expo Center, in a prime position that made it visible to all visitors to the general exhibition.

Following the donation of the work to the city of Milan, Il Seme dell’Altissimo is permanently located near the Triennale, in the Sempione Park. The sculpture is an important element in the redevelopment of the area and with this donation to the capital of Lombardia, Henraux ensures that it once again becomes accessible to a wide audience.

MAPEI products have been used for the installation and conservation of the work, MAPEI is a company close to the needs of Henraux, and one that is always attentive to the combination of industry and art.

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Emilio Isgrò, Il Seme dell’Altissimo, 2015, Bianco Altissimo Marble Photo Gianluca Di Ioia

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“I do not work in planetary cloning. I do not represent what in itself is too conspicuous and visible and therefore does not need any further representations. I, more modestly, represent the seed that is not seen, but which exists”.

Emilio Isgrò, Il Seme dell’Altissimo, 2015, Bianco Altissimo Marble

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Emilio Isgrò, from Teoria del Seme, 1997

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MILAN, WEDNESDAY 20 SEPTEMBER 2017 A SINGULAR DAY

The 20th of September 2017 was, for Henraux, a symbolic day that summarised in just a few hours the variegated essence of the company, its multiple identities.

On one hand, this day marked the launch of the Luce di Carrara brand, Henraux’s designer line, in the Milan area with the pre-opening of its own corner at the Gorlini showroom. On the other, it confirmed the commitment of the Versilian company to contribute to the round table intellectual debate held at the Franco Parenti Theatre, discussing the themes of architecture, art and design.

The Santa Sofia Showroom 27 was a natural choice as a privileged showcase in the design capital: the idea of tailoring is fundamental for both brands. If Luce di Carrara is conceived as a product reserved for interior designers and discerning customers looking for unique performance and custom-made projects in marble, the Milanese concept store is presented like a real “tailor” of interiors in the same way.

The presence of Luce di Carrara in the space is marked by an extraordinary intermingling between marble, glass and wood: Marmeria, by Archea

& Associati, is enclosed in a glass cube, where the transparency and evanescence of glass dialogue with the hardness and the materiality of marble. In addition, is also exhibited PiGreco by Francesco Meda, the piece consists of the unique combination of marble and wood.

Important guests such as Mario Botta, Maurizio Riva of Riva 1920, Aldo Colonetti and Jean Blanchaert attended the vernissage.

It is precisely these names of architecture, design and art that mark the transition to the second part of this exceptional day: guests were invited to move from the Gorlini showroom to the Parenti Theater where a moment of debate on marble and its use took place, followed by a touching theatrical piece by Elisabetta Salvatori: La bimba che aspetta.

After the president, Paolo Carli’s introduction, Blanchaert’s whimsical and fascinating speech, Aldo Colonetti with his repertoire of solid expertise, the extraordinary personal and professional experience of Maurizio Riva and the enlightening wit of Mario Botta all took turns in entertaining and informing the audience.

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Luce di Carrara corner at Gorlini showroom

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Elisabetta Salvatori in her dressing room before the show Teatro Franco Parenti entrance

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Elisabetta Salvatori in scena

4

VOLAREARTE THE FOURTH EDITION WITH HELIDON XHIXHA

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The fourth edition of VolareArte, the biennial event held at the Pisa and Florence airports, and promoted by the Henraux Foundation, was opened on 29 June 2017 thanks to the priceless collaboration of Toscana Aeroporti.

The exhibition adds to, and completes, the rich program of activities designed and implemented

by Henraux, which have increasingly acquired an institutional character, becoming essential dates in the cultural carnet of the Tuscan territory and beyond.

The current edition, which will continue as is usual, for another year until 2019, features Helidon Xhixha with his sculptures made from marble, steel and light.

All of the eleven works – nine of which are located at Pisa airport and two at Florence airport – are monumental in scope. The exhibition itinerary offers the distracted traveller an experience of immediate emotional involvement: exhibited in the outdoor spaces in Pisa are as follows, Nature

in Bianco Altissimo, Carved Dream in Statuario Macchietta and Consciousness in Calacatta, and then Oceano, Terra ferma, Sirena, Elliptical Reflection and Flame in steel. Inside stands Etere in stainless steel polished to a mirrored finish. In Florence are New Beginning in Versilys and Diversity in polished stainless steel.

The grandness of the Albanian artist’s works, combined with the long period of exposure transform the event from the temporary into a legitimate point of reference. This achieves the goal of making it the non-place par excellence, a place of passage, like the airport, it is a point of reference, able to communicate the values and identity of the territory from first glance. It succeeds in placing the artists working in it in the foreground as well as the most representative companies.

Over the years, VolareArte has created a profile of ever greater depth. This is especially true from a purely artistic point of view, it achieves

one of the most important objectives that art, and in particular the art intended for large, public areas, strives to attain: to unite different cultures and people.

It does all this by choosing to take place in a space that is not intended to present art, and give it, as far as is possible, the identity of a destination where you can admire works of genius and creativity, whilst also selecting international artists who enclose the meaning of the word “meeting” both in their lifestyle and in the essence of their work.

Henraux is grateful to Helidon Xhixha – an artist of Albanian origin, who works between Italy and Dubai and is a tireless explorer of new, creative possibilities – for having accepted the invitation to participate in this current edition of VolareArte. He is an artist whose life and work fully embody this spirit.

With thanks to TENAX for their kind cooperation and contribution.

Thanks also to Contini Art UK, the Hotel Principe of Forte dei Marmi and the Travertini Paradiso for their collaboration.

Letf Helidon Xhixha at work Photo Nicola Gnesi Oceano, 2014 Mirror polished stainless steel cm 150x90x300

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Carved Dream, 2016 Marmo Statuario Macchietta cm 157x106x300

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Nature, 2016 Marmo Bianco Altissimo cm 100x160x400

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