Works Andrea Viviani

Andrea Viviani

Andrea Viviani’s ceramic sculptures reflect the polymorphic variety and dynamic development of natural complexity. It is extrapolated from the defenseless block of petrous terracotta which, through an alchemical operating process, mastered by the “artiflex bonus” with great manual and technical skill in mixing and firing, shaping and turning, reveals unexpected intrinsic qualities of the material, thanks to the progressive emergence in reduction of oxygen of the minerals contained in the enamels that cover the surface, of metallic glows, opalescence effects, or copper plating from gold to red-brown and from blue to purple, following the dictates of the ancient Japanese technique of Raku firing, born in the sixteenth century A.D. A process that, going beyond mere mimesis, adapts to the metamorphic needs of natural matter to reveal its innate beauty, subject to the unexpected and approximation, which puts the artist in a synergistic empathy with the biological rhythms of growth and germination of the ecosystem that surrounds him. Irregular shapes of organic inspiration thus emerge, similar to volcanic basalts, rocky concretions, corals, iridescent stones, minerals of multifaceted iridescence, covered with graphemes of delicate pictorial virtuosity, or houses of metaphysical allure and fish of grotesque expression, sometimes stacked in totems of ascetic abstraction meandering upwards in a proliferation of elements that expand outwards in an open and articulated perceptive relationships with the environment.

Their movement reflects the complexity of natural elements, their angularity, their irregular course, their asymmetry and their imbalance, which is reflected in the unstable tremor of the vibration of the open and pulsating forms of the work and in the dematerialization of their irregular surfaces in the light reflecting the elusive incompleteness of life, in perpetual transformation. After graduating in Political Economy, he will follow a completely different path that will lead him to appropriate the multiform experimentalism of another Trentino, Fortunato Depero, in his desire to build plastic complexes open to a phantasmagorical universe, veiled with musicality and irony, as he wanted the "futurist reconstruction of the universe", while Viviani's pictorial verve comes from his frequentation of the artist and designer Riccardo Schweizer, who will direct him towards Roger Capron, Picasso's ceramist after the Second World War, in Vallauris, in Provence, from whom he learns the techniques of ceramics working that he will develop in his workshop in Madonna di Campiglio, where he currently lives and works.
From these masters he also learns to make the multifaceted variety of shapes, colors and signs, in continuous evolution, his specificity. His works take on, thus, a symbolic and totemic value from the intellectual encounter with the "liquid thought" of the sociologist Bauman: in contrast to the "submerged" life of the fish that perceive the external world through the senses, without elaborating them internally with a conscious mechanism and continually modifying the form of thought, there is that of the coral, hard as Rodin's thinker who elaborates direct experience from within and accumulates it. In Viviani's works, we impersonate both sides.
The artist has exhibited in numerous public spaces in Italy, at MACRO Testaccio and the Villa Torlonia Museums in Rome, at the Italian Pavilion of Expo 2015, at Villa Ghirlanda Silva in Cinisello Balsamo (Mi), at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Albissola Marina (Sv), at Palazzo Stella in Genoa, in Providence, USA, in Berlin and at the Westerwald-Museum in Höhr-grenzhausen, Germany. The artist's works are present in the Museum of the Academy of Fine Arts "Pietro Vannucci" in Perugia, in the Museum of Ceramics in Carouge, Switzerland, in the Westerwald-Museum in Höhr-grenzhausen, Germany, and in the Museum of Ceramics Cielle in Castellamonte (To). In 2017, he was the winner of the First Prize at the International Ceramics Competition in Carouge, Geneva.