Nipponic Suggestion (Diameter 120 cm)

Nipponic Suggestion was born in correspondence of the exhibition “T…erre” (“L…ands”) to which I took part at the Transatlantico of the Bologna’s train station. It’s a study on volumes. I wanted to give shape and color to a Japanese symbol. A beautiful photographic book on contemporary Japan has always been around my house, present of my father-in-law; every page has a different symbol, in black and white, in contrast with the vivid colors of the pictures, people in the streets, fabrics, buildings, colored lives. I was intrigued by their stylistic efficacy, graphic simplicity and synthesis, an esthetic attraction more than content-oriented, because I was never able to find the original meaning of that symbol. I wanted to take on a parietal sculpture, inspired by the modular and architectural sculptures of Nino Caruso, a great ceramics master from whom I’ve learnt a lot both through his writings and through a meeting some years before executing Nipponic Suggestion, when I went to visit one of his exhibitions in Perugia. Once completed in those dimensions, the little black and white symbol had become something else, many people see two big eyes, the eyes of an owl. I like this transformation, the idea of having started from a point without knowing where I would have landed, and finding myself in awe towards something I hadn’t even imagined.