Diretto Murano

The jarring dichotomy inherent in the notion of “designing” ’blown’ glass stands at the core of a reasoning which, however unpopular, is of topical importance: should contemporary glass (which in Italy is still synonymous with Murano) be considered “artistic glass” or “designer glass”? And again, is a mediation feasible between the two extremes: can a design control and regulate a unique workmanship, without by this diminishing its value? In other words is there a way to make true Muranese blown glass aesthetically valid but at the same time economically acceptable to a wider number of users, thus allowing it to regain its status of a product which is indeed precious but also more everyday. A challenge this by no means at odds with “artistic glass” but certainly, indeed necessarily, contrary to “souvenir glass”. This was one of the aims inherent in the request we advanced to young Central Eastern European designers to take up the challenge of submitting a project for blown glass. Obviously the task was very difficult and the way forward necessarily long. The projects evaluated by the jury often carried the legacy of deeply rooted commonplace beliefs, the most widespread being an attempt to achieve artistic content, or otherwise suffered from a lack of clear knowledge of the techniques of glass-blowing and of the enormous, yet specific, possibilities they can offer. However, the selection yielded a spark of hope which I think may be worth looking into.
Should we wish to typify what was presented, we could identify four broad categories of interventions. A first group of projects re-addressed the high Muranese tradition, with evident references to the masters, drawing from the great technical ability that has always distinguished their work. See for example the large centrepiece “Centroabita” - one of the two winning projects - by the Slovenian designer Juri Dobrila, which using the pincers technique elaborates on the eternal spiral, “Sprout” the double-mouthed vase by the Hungarian designer Gabor Molnar, the decorative pirogue-shaped “Black Wind” by the Italian artist Patrizia Baldan and the slight, seemingly suspended, soliflor by the Belgrade-based designer Milos Joksimovic.
A second group worked along the postulates of design, propounding the preciousness of glass through contemporary forms. Epitomising this is the second winning project, “Glassbowling” by the young Berlin-based designer Annika Giesbert, a poetic ice bucket itself held in balance by an ice cube. The melting of the ice cube, and thereby its “loss of function”, is revealed by the progressive inclination of the bowl. Similar poetic strength can be found in the large fishplate by the Trieste group, Ruggero De Calò, Maurizio Anselmi, Giulio Stagni: a minimal surface apparently inflected by the weight of that which it is meant to hold.
A third group of projects puts forward a new range of possibilities of use which aims at transcending the notion of decoration that is normally inherent in blown glass. To this group belongs the “Le Corbusier Collection” by Katija Lipicnik from Slovenia, a set of bottles and glasses which finds in the ceramic-like use of lattimo and in the asymmetry of the necks its specific metaphysical Morandian dimension. Likewise the centrepiece (originally a soap-holder) made up of innumerable bubbles like solidified foam, submitted by the Austrian designer Claudia Pfleger, and the hemisphere perforated by extractable cones by the Trieste designers Patrizia Magnani e Giovanni Panizon. Initially planned as an umbrella holder but probably usable only as a flower-holder, the latter piece certainly distances itself from the “vase aesthetic”. Also ascribable to this logic is the proposal by the Ukrainian group “NCA-New Creative Association Fund” (Valentin Rayevsky and Andriy Bokotey) to use glass, in Venice, as a graphical icon sign half way between an installation and an advertisement billboard.
The last group, represented in the exhibition by the “Smorfie” project of the young Italian artist Marta Ceruti, treats glass as a purely artistic material, as a support for the direct intervention of the artist.
I believe it is not a matter of deciding which of these four approaches is the most correct, although of course the jury members had individual and distinctive ideas about this, but rather of showing the very wide range of possibilities that, through the work of young designers, our contemporary world can derive from a reality, a tradition and a place which too many insist on considering bound solely to the past.

Marco Romanelli