FAVENTIA – 12/12. Giacinto Cerone

From December 12th, 2024, to January 11th, 2025, BUILDINGBOX hosts the sculpture Senza Titolo (1994) by Giacinto Cerone (Melfi, 1957 – Rome, 2004).

For Giacinto Cerone, ceramics represent one of the fundamental expressions of sculptural research, fully manifesting an adherence to a deliberately anti-monumental language and an intense yet well-balanced gestural practice. Starting from a hollow geometric block made of unfired clay, an element characterized by primary geometries and overt compactness, the artist intervenes with an overwhelming performativity, subjecting the material to twists, cracks, lacerations, and fragments. He works with frenzy and vehemence using either his bare hands or tools such as sticks and pipes. There are numerous video recordings documenting his work on terracotta and plaster, his favorite materials.
Looking to masters such as Leoncillo Leonardi, Lucio Fontana, or Giuseppe Spagnulo, Cerone interprets the lesson of the Informal movement through the most extreme of contrasts, those between the wounded carnality of the sculptural body and the brilliance of the glazed surfaces. A vivid, bloody red characterizes a broad series of works, exetending even to large blocks that have been literally tortured yet blaze as brightly as car bodies. The artist’s stated goal is to make visible and immediate, almost fossilized, the energy of that shaping gesture capable of creation and destruction, to the point of showing the empty interior of the sculptural mass. To this is added an attempt to establish a balance between verticality – clear in the frequent use of the stele form – and the fall, the ruin, in the manner of the late Michelangelo in the Pietà Rondanini.
The work was created in the Bottega d’Arte Ceramica Gatti in Faenza.

From January 12th, 2024, to January 11th, 2025, BUILDINGBOX presents FAVENTIA. Ceramica italiana contemporanea [Contemporary Italian Ceramics], an exhibition project curated by Roberto Lacarbonara and Gaspare Luigi Marcone, involving twelve Italian artists invited to exhibit sculptures and installations made of ceramics. This programme is dedicated to the centuries-old artistic tradition of the city of Faenza, one of Italy’s main production districts, as well as the seat and epicentre of themed projects and museums such as the “MIC International Ceramics Museum”, the “Premio Faenza”, and the “Museo Carlo Zauli”. Furthermore, the exhibition was conceived as a tribute toward an area affected by the flood of May 2023.

As with BUILDINGBOX’s usual annual schedule, the exhibition hosts monthly interventions. In this edition, the artworks will be presented on the 12th day of each month. This “numerology” alludes to the cyclical nature and synthesis of earthly, spiritual, and temporal elements, as well as the numerous symbologies associated with the number 12 in history and cultures from different parts of the world.

The project maps and summarises some of the main artistic expressions related to the 20th and 21st centuries ceramics, promoting a series of artists from different generations who, consistently or sporadically with respect to their own production, use clay working techniques by continuing, recovering, or revolutionising the extraordinary manual skill of moulding, and the chromatic-luminist value of the glazes.

The ancient Faventia has been a land of artisan production since Roman times, a characteristic that was enhanced in later centuries. Indeed, it became synonymous of the majolica ceramics in many languages – French (faïance), English (faience). In recent years, many artists have used the Faenza kilns – also thanks to residency programmes, exhibitions, workshops, prizes, and publications – for the artistic production of medium and large-scale sculptures, often designed for an environmental development and installation purposes. The primal, demiurgic act of shaping the clay gives ceramics an exclusive status, almost an ontology, the auroral condition of sculpture. In the manipulation’s plastic immediacy that precedes the firing that crystallises the piece, there is all the naturalness of a slow, thoughtful transformation poised between design and chance. In ceramics, as in drawing, there is the seed of an origin, that appears on the surface of the image and things in the precise moment of their conception. Ceramics – beyond the categorisations between craft, art, functional objects, unique, or mass-produced piece – possesses an intermediary (or intermediality) between thought and gesture, sign and sculpture, form and colour, operating, moreover, with various natural elements such as earth, water, and fire; and by hybridising artistic languages, techniques, research, and knowledge between artists and artisans.