Spazio RT exhibition in Milan puts Ceroli and Zoboli's works in dialogue

Until July 15, 2024, Spazio RT in Milan is hosting the exhibition Modules, Thoughts and Images. Ceroli 74-Zoboli 24, conceived by the design gallery. The project presents Mario Ceroli ’s work Pensieri e immagini di Daria (Thoughts and Images of Daria ) from 1974, never before included in an exhibition, placing it in dialogue with Tra-vasi, the first ceramic work signed in 2024 by Francesca Zoboli. Ceroli’s work is a sculpture composed of 25 wooden panels including symbolic figures, elementary structures, signs of myth and irregular shapes. The complete sculpture was placed as a wall covering inside the home of a collector, with special contextualization work directly supervised by the artist. Daria’s Thoughts and Images plastically gives shape to the idea that emerged in Ceroli’s work that art must be detached from the nail on the wall to enter real life.

Francesca Zoboli was involved in this regard: visual designer, decorator and painter. The result was Tra-vasi, an artifact in which Zoboli experimented with ceramics for the first time. Consisting of four panels that form a single column of almost three meters, it was made in a limited numbering of 30 pieces by an artisan workshop in the Bassano del Grappa district. The design reworks on a giant scale a theme dear to the author: the vase. Primordial geometry that in 2021 Zoboli had explored in the book Travasi, published by La Grande Illusion. The installation is complemented by a series of presences of a domestic nature: furniture designed by Spazio RT and unique pieces of historical design, presented, however, not as ready-made objects, but deconstructed, broken down into parts not yet assembled. The idea is that of a still-image that fixes the objects along the design and construction path, at a moment other than their ordinary, completed condition.

“We wanted to tackle an investigation, often considered dangerous and therefore shunned, into the porosity of the boundaries between art, applied art and interior architecture,” explain Antonio and Jacopo Tabarelli de Fatis, founders of Spazio RT.

Notes on the artists

Mario Ceroli was born in Castel Frentano (Chieti) on May 17, 1938. His work is sculpture, painting, drawing, creation of objects, environments and stage sets. Ceroli is a multifaceted, mercurial, versatile artist with an extraordinary ability to mix every art. It is difficult to separate one of his sculptures from the pictorial aspect, furnishings from sculpture and images. Not just a sculptor of materials, Ceroli seems more interested in creating spaces, environments, stage sets. A separate biography would deserve to be written for Mario Ceroli’s activity with the theater: here, too, sculpture and set design come together to create majestic stages. His sculpture builds rather than molds; the forms are tangible concepts and never abstractions; they are almost always simple, objective, concrete ideas.

Francesca Zoboli graduated in Visual Design from the Polytechnic School of Design, and in painting, from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. She has been involved in interior decoration since 1990, designing and creating interventions in public and private spaces, such as the decorative panels created for Kenzo’s concept store, in Paris; since 2013 she has been designing wallpaper for the company Wall&decò. Her work, which treads a fine line between painting and decoration, has made paper her material of choice: from precious collages of poor papers, treated with rice starch colors and inks, to large abstract assemblages, inspired by textiles, carpets and tapestries, made using combs and tools specifically developed to achieve unique textures and effects. Lately she has also devoted herself to designing and illustrating books for small publishing houses, or artist’s books made in unique or limited copies. She teaches painting techniques at IED in Turin. She lives and works in Milan.

Practical information.

Monday: 3-7 p.m.; Tuesday-Saturday: 10 a.m.-1 p.m., 3-7 p.m.

Image: exhibition set-up. Photo: Marco Dapino

Spazio RT exhibition in Milan puts Ceroli and Zoboli's works in dialogue

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