Adornment-Contemporary Jewelry Exhibition showcased contemporary jewelry and carries on reflection and debate on the relationship between the jewel, design and fine art.
Programmed within the largest event on design DesignVe and curated by Ilaria Ruggiero, the exhibition has been made possible thanks to the support of the prestigious Alchimia – Contemporary Jewellery School and under the patronage of the Associazione Gioiello Contemporaneo.
Design.Ve is the brainchild of Francesca Giubilei and Luca Berta – independent curators, gallery owners and
founders of Venice Art Factory – lives of the contribution of an international scientific committee composed by Joris Montens, Ilaria Ruggiero, Francesca Valente, Nannet van der Kleijn, Micaela Zucconi and benefits from the advice of Atemporary Studio to offer an unprecedented look on design.
It appears as a diffuse festival where the element of installation, enhanced naturally by urban frame, interacts with a structured exhibition size, and where the traditional craftsmanship meets modern productive experimentation: emerging designers as well as international design brands carried out the new city map in design Walks Through Venice.
Adornment-Contemporary Jewelry Exhibition represents, within the festival, the section devoted to contemporary jewelry.
With the intention of creating an annual event in Venetian cultural programming, this year’s theme is ‘The shape of wearable art’: a jewel that explores the typical formal boundaries of the body to challenge the mere fit and cross them.
The exhibition expands the fluid and wide boundaries of wearable art, seeking the original meaning of the ornament as a symbol of deep identification and belonging, at the social and spiritual level, to a specific community. Especially this year, pieces were selected for shapes, design and clever use of material, challenging the conventional space of fit to cross it and enter into dialogue with the body in a way that is unexpected, able to unveil new senses and meanings tied to the identity of the individual, as single human being or inserted in the community.
On display were showcased 14 between artists and designers of international jewel: Rosalba Balsamo, Florence Croisier, Clara del Papa, Marion Delarue, Eleonora Ghilardi, Elie Hirsch, Florence Jaquet,Laberintho, Chiara Lucato, Letizia Maggio, Paola Mirai, Oki Izumi, Nazan Pak and Caterina Zanca.
The selection is varied, ranging from delicate and minimal creations to sculptures.
With its jewel, Florence Croisier draws the body almost as weaving a cloth, proposing a graphic, clean, linear and subtle work thanks to the high quality of the materials used; Florence Jaquet with its Literary Jewels and Chiara Lucato in his collection The Storyteller, intrude into shape to invade the body through stories that are layered in the folds of the paper and in the delicacy of a magic lantern; Elie Hirsch and Oki Izumi interpret two conceptual opposites of jewel sculpture, the first tied to a primordial era, warm and archetypal, almost tribal, while the second focused on the heavenly purity of geometric and light transparency of glass; Eleonora Ghilardi and Letizia Maggio have different and original visions of the ceramic and porcelain jewelry, which is here interpreted in various forms, styles and techniques; Rosalba Balsamo and Paola Mirai work in a futurist and contemporary direction, experimenting with techniques and materials, and giving priority to plastic and aesthetic design. Marion Delarue develops his research straddling Eastern symbolism and introspection, working on the energy of jewelries and treating them as potential amulets; clean lines and attention to geometry characterize the creations of both Nazan Pak and Caterina Zanca, the first attracted to soft, enveloping shapes, the second dedicated to conceptual and minimal compositions that alternate and play with spaces and materials, emptiness and fullness. The goldsmith tradition finds, finally, new expressive potential in the contemporary creations by Clara del Papa and Laberintho, whose jewelry echoing styles of past epochs.
The prestigious Florentine contemporary jewelry school ALCHIMIA bride this project since the beginning and supports its realization. The idea is to enhance a new look on the field of contemporary jewelry in order to highlights, in addition to purely formal research, the desire for a re – appropriation of those symbolic and anthropological values that the jewel has always had since the ancient times of its origins.
Lucia Massei, Director of the school, says, talking about the jewel: “The jewel represents the gift par excellence. It is one of the oldest responses to an aesthetic and emotional human impulse; it has a special potentiality of communication, and allows to better define the identity of the wearer within a social context.”
