MATTIA BONETTI

‘MURANO’

Online exhibition

Murano presents new works by Mattia Bonetti exuding the artist's characteristic playfulness, the collection, handmade with the artist in Murano, pays homage to the much recognised and celebrated historical glass-blowing techniques. Time spent on the Island of Glass has profoundly influenced Bonetti’s practice, and the collection is imbued with the texture of the environment. His palette of green, gold, yellow, white and blue evokes watery reflections and huge skies, as well as the art and architecture of Venice.

Leaves are such a familiar Venetian motif, often found on chandeliers, Bonetti has honoured this historical design practise by enlarging traditional leaf shapes and using them on mirrors and sconces. The classical forms and Grecian decorations of the works are a celebrated feature of Bonetti’s repertoire, also referencing the neoclassicism introduced to the Venetian Republic in the 1730s by Alessandro Pompei.

For an artist as versatile as Bonetti, a single aesthetic is never enough and he brings a contemporary element to the collection with his ‘Grate’ pieces, Bonetti has taken small sticks of glass, classic Murano elements, and criss-crossed them into a modern, geometric design.

While Bonetti has worked with glass once before, at CIRVA (Centre Internatioanal de Recherche sur le Verre et les Arts Plastique), in Marseilles, under the tutelage of maestro Lino Tagliapietra, this collection is a departure for him, requiring an unprecedented level of research. Bonetti’s fascination with the centuries-old process of free-blowing and the magic of turning a piece of glass into a molten mass before its transformation into a nuanced object, led him to Murano. Here, he was able to translate his detailed sketches, working closely with the island’s renowned artisans.