Page 17 - PAOLO STACCIOLI

challenging, in some fashion, its sacredness. He does Umberto Santandrea’s workshop, the fascination and
this, primarily, by inserting “his” little horses with attraction to a medium more appropriate to his artistic
their rolling frames, amidst the legs of the 14th century nature that would bring him to find a new aesthetic
steeds, intrusively infiltrating their space. synthesis.
Staccioli thus permits himself to engage in dangerous Even though we have spoken amply about Staccioli’s
acrobatics, entrusting himself to his inexhaustible period of apprenticeship, and also about his beginnings
imagination. The result is a lively and disenchanted as a ceramicist, we can still benefit from commenting on
prose, rich with neologisms, somewhere between it again, mainly in terms of underscoring a fundamental
the cultural and the dialectical, between traditional element historically linked to previous eras. Traditionally
iconography and fresh spontaneity, refusing every a “trade” was learned in the context of the workshop,
formal orthodoxy. or, even more anciently, within a guild. Staccioli’s
The chromatic range, in these first pictorial works, is artistic culture is bound up with the artesian approach, a
bent toward obtaining a delicate and airy transparency; centuries old practice that he immediately interpreted as
subtle and palpable variations on the monochrome inseparable from the artistic endeavor. That culture, in
theme of the backgrounds present prevailingly spent fact, accepts the requirements of having to pass through
shades of cerulean blue, which contrast the candid each phase of development, as tradition demands: the
grey-white silhouettes of the horses and their bizarre apprenticeship, in order to acquire mastery of the trade,
companions. The texture of the background is often and above all, the constant, daily practicing, thanks to
obtained by irregular, fast and fluid brush strokes, while which the hand and the eye are trained to perceive a
the little figures appear like small dots of light carved world of form and color that is without limits.
out of the absence of color or space, almost evoking a After only a few months in the Faenza workshop,
watercolor effect. Staccioli rapidly acquired the necessary and basic
We could say that Staccioli worked almost exclusively in techniques of glazing and firing to produce his first
painting for about twenty years, until the beginning of vases. The results clearly demonstrated his orientation
the 1990’s. He then found, in Faenza, in the ceramicist toward an inspired decorative ability and a reworking

Ceramica a lustro, 00

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