Càntaros, 2024. Site-specific installation. Ceramics. Photo credit: Marie-José d’Aprile
Outdoor / Serretta Grumello
Càntaros is a site-specific installation floating between art and design, present and memory. In 2014, I was still working in Geneva in an international organisation. It was then that I started creating a series of ceramics plates and prints that reminded me of my childhood. Since then, I knew that something else was to come with that design. It came this year in the shape of a light art mobile that reproduces that same design: “Càntaros”. I have been carrying it for almost ten years now. Blue is for me the colour of lightness and somehow childhood innocence: maybe because as a child I would be looking for hours at clouds that create shapes out of the blue in the sky. I chose blue for the many clay beads that create the evanescent and playful mobile structure of this work. I recently discovered the beauty of telling stories, and that story cannot be told without the joy that collecting dishware induces in many people, me comprised. This also prompted a reflection about art feeding design and vice-versa. Hence, plates and prints are an integral part of the installation.
* The cantarus not only refers to an ancient type of ceramic vessel from the Greco-Roman period, but also indicates an ancient measure of weight or capacity.
Marie-José d’Aprile
Marie-José d'Aprile is an artist who practises ceramics as her main medium of expression. Born in Switzerland to an Italian father and Spanish mother, after spending more than 15 years of her professional career in Geneva with overseas assignments as a lawyer and humanitarian worker, in 2019 she took a leap of faith when moving to Como. Trained at the studio of Daniela Vacca, a ceramist based in Rome, she opened her atelier in 2020. Since then, her work has been a continuous exploration of her own being as an artist, shedding away layers of identity, searching for her own language, with the mere intent to spark emotions with her artwork.