CHIMERA

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

extraordinary in the everyday. Given this background, it was almost

inevitable she would work with CEDIT: constantly seeking new talents

and new approaches, as well as designs that break down the boundaries

of ceramics and release them into the realm of art and innovation,

the Modena company has recognised Elena Salmistraro as a leading

contemporary creative spirit and involved her in a project intended to

experiment with fresh ideas in materials and synaesthetics.

Salmistraro’s collection for CEDIT is entitled Chimera and consists

of large ceramic slabs, which can be enjoyed not only visually, through

their patterns and colours, but also on a tactile level. Like the chimera

in the “grotesque” tradition, monstrous in the etymological sense of the

word with its merging of hybrid animal and vegetable shapes, the CEDIT

project attempts to originate a synaesthetic form of ceramics, through

a three-dimensional development that exactly reproduces the texture

of leathers and fabrics, creating an absolutely new kind of layered

effect, with a tactile awareness that recalls the passion of grand master

Ettore Sottsass for “surfaces that talk”. And the surfaces of the slabs

Salmistraro has created really seem to talk: in Empatia clown faces add

theatricality to the cold gleam of marbles, interspersed with references

to Art Déco graphics; Radici uses the textures of leathers and hide as

if to re-establish a link between ceramics and other materials at the

origins of human activity and creativity; in Ritmo the texture of cloth

dialogues with pottery, almost in homage to the tactile rationalism of

warp and weft, of which Bauhaus pioneer Anni Albers was one of the

most expressive past interpreters; finally, Colore has a spotted base

generated by computer to underline the contrast between analogue

and digital, the graphic sign and the matter into which it is impressed.

It is an aesthetic of superimposition and mixing, and especially

of synaesthesia: as in her drawings, in the Chimera slabs Elena

Salmistraro's art is one of movement and acceleration. A process not of

representation but of exploration. Of the world and of oneself. Almost

a kind of Zen, for distancing oneself from the world to understand it

more fully. In every sense.

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