Tular

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The Etruscan word “TULAR” (meaning border) labels Valerio Giovannini’s last exhibition that investigates the suggestions and connections between his artistic production and those of the “RASENNA” people (the Etruscans). The event, which will take place in Castellina in Chianti from the 19th to the 30th of July 2008, has been reviewed by Marilena Pasquali, an internationally renowned art critic, who founded the Morandi Museum of Bologna and as managed the exhibitions of Toti Scialoja (1991), Omar Galliani (1996), Enrico Baj (1999), Luca Alinari (2000) and the celebrated FolonFirenze (2005).

Born in 1977, Valerio Giovannini is a young Italian artist who has accomplished many personal exhibitions as well as organising and participating in numerous extemporaneous collective happenings. In this event Giovannini proposes work realised with traditional materials (gold, copper and terracotta) used in the arts and crafts of the Etruscan period as well as in today’s crafts and industrial production in the Chianti area. In Giovannini’s art work these traditional elements are combined with modern material (plexiglass) in order to give a new meaning to some “ancient words” (signs, images and decorations) declined according to a contemporary artistic language that renders suggestions and myths of a remote past in present times.

Aplu, 2008, Oro su terracotta su rame + plexiglass, 75x37.5, Collezione privata

The starting point of the creative process were the Etruscan finds kept in the Archeological Museum of Castellina in Chianti, in fact the works have been created to be exposed in this fascinating medieval bourg on the border between Sienna and Florence. This town was the site of many medieval battles between the two counties struggling to expand their territory. Furthermore, already in the Etruscan times, this evocative location was the borderland between the powerful borroughs of Volterra, Chiusi and Fiesole.

The concept of border and boundary (TULAR) is the central theme of the exhibition and offers a key to relate with the past: sixteen “fragments”, between contemporary art and archaeology, conceiving this borderline as the place where today’s art should reside. TULAR being the threshold of knowledge, mixing of materials and meanings; present time as the fine line dividing PAST and FUTURE.

The exhibition deals with that peculiar “Etruscan style” made of balance, rhythm, grace and natural synthesis, still able to speak to our imagination, presenting archaic images in a contemporary way. A primitive and original sign: essential, synthetic and expressive lines linked to the magic elements of Nature. An artistic attitude that perhaps survived in Tuscany at the end of the Etruscan civilization as suggested by David H. Lawrence: “Yet the Etruscan blood continued to beat. And Giotto and the early sculptors seem to have been flowering again of the Etruscan blood…”