CHIMERA

Chimera: note sulla collezione | Chimera: notes on the collection

TACTILE SURFACES

SILVANA ANNICCHIARICO

Design Curator

It all starts with drawing. A passion for drawing. An obsession with

drawing. Drawings like spider-webs, obsessively filling spaces, in a

kind of manual choreography or gymnastics, a continuous flow. Elena

Salmistraro draws all the time. She draws everywhere. Mostly on loose

sheets or random surfaces. First and foremost with pen and pencil. Her

drawings only acquire colour at a later stage. Often - just like Alessandro

Mendini used to do - she draws “monsters”: fascinating yet disturbing,

subversive forms. The denser, more contorted the shape, the more

obvious its underlying truth. For Elena, drawing is an intimate act. It is

relaxing. And therapeutic. With an unrivalled communicative strength.

Because drawing gives shape to ideas: you both give form to the world

and reveal yourself. This passion, combined with natural graphic talent,

has guided Elena Salmistraro in her project for CEDIT: an experimental

series of ceramic slabs produced using a high-definition 3D decorative

technique. The explicit aim is to transform surfaces beyond their original

flatness so that a new, visual and tactile, three-dimensional personality

emerges, sweeping aside the coldness and uniformity that ceramic

objects often inevitably convey.

Elena Salmistraro has always viewed ceramics as a democratic

material, in view of their accessibility, and the infinite potentials for

shaping matter that they provide. She began working and experimenting

with ceramics very early in her career, just after she graduated from the

Milan Politecnico in 2008. She came into contact with small artistic craft

firms specialising in small production lots, and cut her teeth on projects

that demanded the hand-processing of every detail, and finishes of high

artistic value, for the high end of the market. The large corporations

and galleries came later, but here again Elena kept faith with her desire

to make mass-produced pieces unique, and to combine artistic value

with specifically industrial characteristics. The monkey-shaped Primates

vases reflect this method and intention, aiming to excite, surprise and

charm. Antiminimalist and hyper-figurative, playful, ironic and a rich

image-maker, often drawing on anthropology and magic, over the years

Salmistraro has built up her own fantastic universe, inhabited by ceramic

bestiaries, painted jungles and a cabinet like a one-eyed cyclops, always

finding inspiration and inputs in nature and always aiming to reveal the

58 | 59