GIORGIO LAVERI

“Playing with…”

Opening 5th December 2016 from 6pm to 9pm.

05.12.2016 – 27.01.2017

Monday – Friday : 10am – 1pm/3pm – 7pm

Saturday : by appointment

The C+N Canepaneri Gallery has the greatest pleasure of presenting “Playing with…”, the latest solo exhibition of the multi-faceted artist, author and director, Giorgio Laveri.

The Ligurian artist, known for his use of the medium of traditional ceramic techniques since the 1960s, has set up an installation site composed entirely of sand in our Milan Gallery. It is, undoubtedly, a work of vast dimensions bringing together the nature of Laveri’s work: irony, play and lightheartedness, and combining it with the prowess of the expert potter himself. At the heart of this installation piece, there is the theme of an everlasting timeless game of marbles to be played over sand which has been moulded to form a racetrack, not unlike those commonly made by children on Italian beaches in summer. In his installation, Laveri has provided his public with over-sized ceramic marbles, 50 centimetres in diameter, the colours of which he has matched to specific artists: red for Lucio Fontana, blue for Yves Klein and white for Piero Manzoni. In this way, Formula One pilots, cyclists and racing drivers alike, with some of the best artists from the 1900s, will challenge each other to a marble race around a sand racetrack in front of the very eyes of the public.

The installation places itself in the wake of Laveri’s creative activity which transforms an ordinary object into a giant blown-out-of-proportion one, in line with Dada and Pop origins. The resulting works have strong saturated colours and shiny surfaces created by using traditional methods taken from the Albisola School of Ceramics in Liguria. In fact, most of the objects used in Laveri’s works are generally common ones which he transforms into iconic monumental objects of our time, in which the critical eye of consumerism is transformed into a mere playful game, like the gigantic rolls of film that make up the artwork “Subject to be developed” or the “Lipsticks” of the “Trukas” series, the handwriting pens of “Stylò “, as well as “the pencil sharpener” or the series “Cherries”.

In fact, being a creator of such projects which focus on the development of Art in the Community as a facilitator and stimulator of particular behaviour, Laveri, through this exhibition “Playing with...”, succeeds in acting out a dynamic relationship through a recreational and playful approach, flavoured with the memory of a time gone by and with the simplicity of a children’s game from the past, all a far cry from the virtual activities dictated by today’s ever-increasing use of digital technology.

Giorgio Laveri, born in Savona in 1953, lives between Italia, France and South America. After having studied Film Direction, during the 1960s, he went on to research the creativity to be found in cinema and theatre, in which period he wrote 11 theatre performances and 19 films. At the same time, he also dedicated himself to painting and sculpture works. In 1973, he set up his first solo exhibition at the Vultur Gallery in Genoa and then, immediately in the following years, focused on various experiments with ceramics, which led to his first work of art of the series “Cineceramica” created in 1984. The photo frames created in ceramic, inspired by some of the greatest films, were then presented in the “Galleria del Duomo” in Milan on the occasion of the Award Ceremony of the “1988 Biennial Venice Film Festival”. Then, in 1993, Laveri, together with his artist and friend, Patrick Moya, founded the Mediterranean Artistic Movement to better promote an awareness of the world of ceramic art, subsequently joining the French Group, Art Mobil, with whom he went on to organise a series of events in both Italy and France. Since 1998, he has participated in some two hundred art exhibitions, cinema events and theatre shows.