Goodness knows whether the crowd queuing patiently outside the historic gates of the Nicoli Studio workshop to attend Vanessa’s event had ever seen a sculpture studio before? And who knows if one of the many “Girls of San Frediano” (Bartolini’s models in Florence) had ever posed directly in the fantastic factory? When Arturo Martini sculpted Woman Swimming Underwater was there some young woman from Carrara or Marina, who posed after the workers left and posed with Signora Franca (Francesca’s grandmother) far away?
True, sculptors’ studios are full of ethereal female images in plaster or marble: sometimes in flesh and blood, between wives, other wives, lovers, models, daughters, mothers and grandmothers… And finally at Carrara in the third millennium there appeared that very determined Vanessa (Genoese, like Franca mentioned above) and disturbed the dusty spaces of the most famous and ancient marble sculpture workshop.
I like to think that the disquieting mythical muse of bygone times, the Louise Bourgeois whom we all love, smiled with joy from the height of this new provocation and acclamation. Thank you Vanessa and Francesca.
And again, under the excellent directorship of Fabio Cavallucci, a gentle Romagnolo indicated by many as the man to watch in the future of international art criticism, some of the most important players in these troubled times for contemporary art were presented in Carrara. Between Vanessa Beecroft’s barefooted and naked nymphs, reclining in the historic dust of the Studio Nicoli and the work of Cattelan, the tomb that Craxi would probably have really liked for himself, Cavallucci composed a refined mosaic of marble tiles of the greatest significance. And he rocked this enchanted summer at Carrara, a town that can be soporific, by presenting a prestigious event which seems almost to be the answer that the rustic city of marble has long wished to give Pietrasanta, its sister city dressed in designer sundresses for the inhabitants of Forte dei Marmi.
Sculpture in these parts can also mean this: being provocative in order to create. So among the long wanderings from place to place this Biennale often “under the ancient trusses,” seems to have been the lively event strongly willed into existence by the tousled Francesca Nicoli (from a family that has trodden in marble dust and art for four generations). It marked the climax to our long summer. Dust, plaster casts, models and mannequins. The amusing and challenging thing in the coming months will be to see the (perhaps monumental) works that will eventually be carved in marble after these complex moments of spectacle, under the aegis of the “Postmonument.”
Pier Giorgio Balocchi
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