LUANA PERILLI: Solitary Shelters

The Gallery Apart is proud to open its new 2014/2015 season with the exhibition Solitary Shelters, the third solo show by Luana Perilli hosted in our gallery. Although the artist’s exploration, this time focused on the relationships between nature and culture, or rather between ideology and ecology, highlights a common thread running through the work carried out over the last few years based on the eusocial animals and the relationships of their social structures with the human societies, the means chosen for this new series of works departs from the previous production and focuses on ceramic sculpture, chosen as an artistic expression hinged on an ancient and intercultural language, compatible with the natural habitats. The typologies and forms, selected, imagined, drawn and personally shaped and sculpted by the artist using the potter’s wheel, create structures that may have the double function of sculptures and of Shelters or nest for the pollinating insects, combining both the ethical and aesthetic functions within the same object. The link between the natural and artifactual world in virtue of the human presence and action in this case is inspired to a particular design style, the organic modern, which drew on the concept of organic architecture introduced by Frank Lloyd Wright in the late 1940s and which has inspired several architects who, over the following decades, have delivered new and brilliant interpretations, such as the renowned Buckminster Fuller. Perilli has then taken as a model  elements of design inspired to nature by delving into the German art pottery from the 1950s and 1960s, in particular those by Sgrafo, Fat Lava and Rosenthal, making the formal suggestion an element that nature can actually embrace.

The reference to the furniture item, which is so recurring in the artist’s poetics, serves both as an evocative factor of a bourgeois lifestyle able to recall values and lifestyles so invasive in their heyday as ephemeral in a historical perspective, and as a prompt to present new combinations of forms and materials. The sculptures thus merge and integrate in the ceramics  other natural elements which are typical of the modern, such as the agate gemstones and some plants.