INTUR – SARDEGNA

Wind, Water, Stone

Inside the new edition of Younique – Fine Craft Art and Design 2024, in the prestigious and evocative setting of Villa Ciani, the exhibition Wind, Water, Stone tells the story of Sardinia, represented in a special connection between contemporary art, design, and popular culture through the work of artists, designers, and artisans.

Selected artists from the Sardinian contemporary scene, with their works invite you to immerse yourself in the island, between land, sea, sun, and wind. The artistic research takes shape through the objects, signs, and themes linked to the heritage of Sardinia and its surroundings, they strengthen the image and value, in perfect balance between experimentation and tradition.

Wild and welcoming mother earth, where the elements of nature stimulate you to reconnect with all, finding harmony. Sardinia is a land of powerful materials and images of primordial nature, that offer artists reflections and suggestions.

The solid, rough, and protective stone, an ancestral symbol full of magnetism, takes shape in the skilled hands of the ceramists on display. Like the series of vases, Like Stones, in raw earth created by the artist Maria Jole Serreli, who re-elaborates daily objects with an archaic meaning in her poetics.

Also the Flowering Stones by Jubanna, an artist from Nuoro, from which olive branches and small glazed ceramic flowers sprout, in his compositions and his research through the use of natural materials, earth, wood, and iron gives us back to primitivism atavistic origin of an island among the oldest emerged lands in the world.

The suggestions of an island in the center of the Mediterranean, for centuries a place of exchanges, meetings, and passages, can only come from the sea, making water the protagonist in thematic research and artistic subjects.

Lalla Lussu with the series of watercolors leads us to see through light released by the water which dissolves the pigment in overlapping veils of color, the element water is always linked to the path of purification, he reveals his energetic strength in watercolors.

The Cagliari-born artist celebrates the rite called Ramadura, an expanse of petals spread on the ground to form a floral carpet homage to the Saint, capturing his light and color, using magnification of a detail of the natural object to arrive at abstraction. With his Barks the artist investigates the natural richness of the wetlands of Sardinia where the sea intertwines its waters to the suspended lands, dressed in samphire, multiplied in the reflections of thin waters inhabited by pink flamingos.

Mediterranean landscape elements that we also find expressed in the creations of Paulina Herrera Letelier, who creates with strong synergy with island artisans, originally from Chile, her base in Sardinia put her in contact with the world of weaving, an archaic art preserved by the workers of Sardinia, custodians of age-old gestures and patterns that still exist today contribute to the production of unique artifacts in the world.

Mara Damiani addresses the theme of identity design, which she has embodied since the early twentieth century the desire to recover the immense and precious island artisan heritage, developed in starting from the 1950s with the futuristic ISOLA project. Following the footsteps of great artists and intellectuals like Ubaldo Badas and Eugenio Tavolara, the designer collects the symbolic seeds of the generative forces underlying the historical evolution of communities.

A story that uses non-systems conventional transmission of authentic values ​​that Mara Damiani is capable of collecting and reworking with great refinement and respect.

Simone Dulcis, one of the best-known and most appreciated artists in Sardinia, embraces the informal movement because it is similar to his aniconic poetics made of sound, harmony, and nature. His canvases and his works sculptural collect the impressions of skies torn by rapid clouds. A vital nature in continuous mutation that is felt strong and present on the island.

Silences amplify the perception of eternal values ​​that the artist knows how to sublimate in a rarefied painting in which the turmoil is barely there held by a profound lyricism.

MARA DAMIANI

Mara Damiani was born in Cagliari with a pencil and brush in her hand. She went to Art School in Cagliari, then Architecture in Florence, and finally to Brera, Fine Art Academy. During the end of the 90s, in the middle of increasing transition to digital, Mara joined The Walt Disney Company as a freelancer. She trained and refined her artistic skills in the digital sphere, and then worked in Publishing and Licensing collaborating with various international companies such as Bormioli, Egmont, Cartorama, Nestlè, ACMilan and Expo2015/2021.

After 20 years in Milan, Mara felt a strong call to her homeland Sardinia, with a huge thirst for studying, discovering and creating something completely by her own.

She left everything and devote herself to a project with a strong personal touch, which laid the foundations for what is currently her form of expression and identity design.

Since 2016 Mara has collaborated with Sardinia’s artisans and craft companies to create diverse art&design products. At the end of 2018 she published “CarrasecareDesign”, a design book narrating 24 Sardinian carnivals, having also solo and group exhibitions.

Mara’s aim is to make people aware of their heritage, stories and traditions using an accessible and inclusive visual language that can be understood by people of all ages. In her work, the Sardinian cultural heritage is told through colours, graphics, and stylistic elements. In her process there is still a touch of magic appeal that Disney taught her, which has now become a methodology that can be adapted to any story, place, material and surface. Mara narrates Sardinia through identity design that can reach each one of us, with clarity, emotion and simplicity.

SIMONE DULCIS

Simone Dulcis was born in Milan in 1971. He is a painter, audio and visual Artist that lives and works in Cagliari, Sardegna (Italy). His artworks are present in private collections, museums and art foundation in Italy and abroad. Among recent exhibitions: Orbis – Fondazione per l’arte Bartoli-Felter – Cagliari (2017), Leaving Room_“unpassodalladdìo” – Spazio In)visibile, Cagliari (2016), Temporaneo E Permanente, Dulcis/Gramsdorff – Galleria Schillerstrasse106, Berlin (2014), Cattedrali – Spazio In)visibile, Cagliari (2013), ConNaissance – Rassegna: Caratteri Ereditari e Mutazioni Genetiche (sala personale) –  Museo MAN, Nuoro (2012). Con Theca Gallery ha esposto in Co-Naissance, Albetti/ Dulcis (2013) e nello stesso anno anche alla Budapest Art Fair.

PAULINA HERRERA LETELIER

Paulina Herrera Letelier is an architect based in Sardinia with over 15 years of experience in both public and private architectural design, as well as in residential and hospitality sectors. Since 2014, she has also been dedicated to designing objects in collaboration with various companies and local artisans.

Many of her projects are influenced by elements found in the Mediterranean landscape and culture, which are interconnected on a playing field with variables such as mathematical operations, digital language, sounds and animations.

She works with various materials and media, including painting, ceramics, basalt and marble. Additionally, she has developed a strong affinity for the textile field, exploring different weaving techniques for manual and jacquard looms. Since 2014, she has designed several collections of carpets, tapestries and fabrics for interior decoration for Mariantonia Urru.

JUBANNA

Jubanna resides in Sardinia, in Cagliari, but was born in Nuoro in the heart of the island in the internal area called Barbagia. After the master’s degree, he graduated as Master Ceramista and obtained the diploma of Ceramic Decorator. In Urbino he specializes in Raku ceramics, experimenting with rough surfaces on refractory pastes. Formed in an “agro-pastoral” climate under the influence of nature in all its forms, it immediately stands out a tendency to primitivism, where the artist immediately highlights the search for a new spatiality that the artist identifies in the use of land, coal, coal and rope, of rusty iron.

The direct use of materials considered extra pictorial leads to give shapes, colours and distinctive odours of the primary natural primary elements to be transformed into poetic energies through the mechanisms of the imaginary, myth, culture, culture and the classic and religious ideals, of passions. After training in Experimental Archaeology, he has developed courses related to the Nuragic Ceramic tradition in numerous schools and municipalities of Barbagia and Campidano.

He has exhibited his installations in various exhibitions, both collective and personal, in Sardinia, Italy and abroad, he has participated in several different exhibitions art competitions obtaining prizes and mentions from the Jury and the public.

LALLA LUSSU

Lalla Lussu (1953-2020) lived and worked in Cagliari. After graduating in History of Contemporary Art with a thesis on the artist Enrico Castellani, since 1984 she has been a teacher of Pictorial Disciplines at the Foiso Fois High School of art in Cagliari. In 1971 he attended the painting course at the Internatìonale Sommerarakademìe fur Bildende Künst in Salzburg with the master Heinz Trökes, and in 1989, with the master Jörg Immendorf.

In the 1980s and 1990s,her attention was captured by a pictorial expression close to abstraction, and which takes inspiration from the seabed populated by fish to the land, from the abyss to the roots, to the living being , flower or tree, petal and leaf, stem and frond.

From the beginning of the 2000s he decided to turn all his attention and commitment to the watercolor technique and the possibility of new experiments, the Ramadura series is from this period, dedicated to the ancestral rite of the ramadura, an expanse of petals to pay homage to the passage of Sant’Efisio, with the watercolor Lalla Lussu, starting from the detail of the petal, enlarges it until reaching abstraction.

Since 2012 the artist began working on natural linen sheets, pleated and hand-painted fabrics in which the tireless research on the links between Art and Nature meets his ideal and spiritual world.

MARIA JOLE SERRELI

Maria Jole Serreli (Rome 1975) is a multidisciplinary artist who expresses her artistic vision both in poetry and  in performance art, characterized by a strong relationship with the materials used in her  works, especially when she works with old fabrics   and objects.

Living and working in Sardinia, she is often inspired by the archaic essence of her homeland, translating it into an art that adopts the concept of domestic life by giving value to the simple objects of everyday life, that awaken the memories to connect with our dearest ones.

Serreli aspires to gracefully honor   the female archetype,  through poetry;  she builds an intricate “nest” of threads, creating a safe space in which we can relax, protected as if we were in a cocoon of  silk.

She  works with  old domestic embroidered fabrics, photographs, pieces of wood and leaves, old books, antique cutlery and even real paintbrushes, all assembled in a delicate and poetic composition so to recreate the feeling of vital energy transmitted by Chinese art Gionghi, using black ink,  faded whites carpets and the organic and raw texture of the wood.

These compositions are an invitation to meditation and to an ethereal, harmonious and balanced world, which today represents aa interesting and original  message. They are a tribute to the collective memory.