Page 28 - MARCELLO FANTONI

techniques of ceramic modeling are learned, Fantoni’s
students begin instinctively to move toward the mastery
of a personal art, that they will acquire gradually, if their
artistic vocation is solid and constant. Fantoni smiles,
good-naturedly amused,when telling of the impatience
that he sees in his young students who would like to,
after a few months of school, reach his results, eager to
by-pass that slow and arduous practicing of the trade,
through which every good ceramicist must pass.
Fantoni’s own experience is exemplarily in this sense,
and each student, who truly feels in himself a firm
desire to become an artist, knows that it is not only
ceramic art that he will learn from Fantoni but also the
art of discipline and perseverance which is a basic
requirement to be able to bring to term their own art
and life project.
The fruit of this unparalleled experience
converges, from the end of the 50’s until today, with the
most important acknowledgments that collectors, art
critics, and public institutions express regarding
Marcello Fantoni’s art. In the long recounting of the
Master’s memories, he admits smiling, that the last fifty
years of his life can, without a doubt, be summarized by
a continuous and incessant series of successes, prizes
won, personal shows, public commissions, and
purchases of works by some of the most important
museums in the world. Hard work amply repaid and
even more amply documented and commented upon
by art critics, make him today a gratified and serene
person who is still a victim of inspiration, of searching
for new forms, new experimentation, new life.
Pier Francesco Listri writes, “ I look at Fantoni,
who has the mischievous face of a boy, only wrinkled
by a thousand, small, fine lines, and I think of an entire
life modeling earth, simply earth, [….]And he smiles
like a boy. A boy who has modeled ten thousand vases”
and it is exactly this sensation that one feels in front of
Marcello Fantoni. His vitality is still so irrepressible as
to negate, in his interlocutor, the cognition of the time
passed. His memories are fresh, sweetened by emotion
and amusement, relived with each recounting and
presented with such emotion as to transport us there,
where they happened, there, where he lived them.
And, his sculptures, seeped as well in this history, seem
to support the renewing of his memory; more eloquent
than any writing,they renew in Fantoni the moment of
creation, so as to travel again along that path where his
art and his life are joined in a single journey.

Elisa Gradi

6 P. F. LISTRI, Una vita per diecimila vasi, in “Arte e Vacanze”, I, 2,
settembre-ottobre, p. 32.

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