Precious memories - Pitti Palace, Museo delle Porcellane

Precious memories - Pitti Palace, Museo delle Porcellane

From October 19 2007 To September 28 2008

Precious memories - Pitti Palace, Museo delle Porcellane

Paola Crema has an extraordinary technical expertise, especially in the masterful working of silver into grains, bowls and hollow clusters of organic plasticism. This skill is laid at the service of a sumptuous imagination, an exuberance nourished by a figurative culture profoundly assimilated through the artist’s tireless and receptive investigation of all things, not only beautiful, but that encapsulate in their beauty the obscure gleam of the bizarre and the excessive, of a dream ready to morph into nightmare. 

 For Paola Crema the art of the past can still proudly reveal something vital in all directions, retrieved by recollection and retraced with evocative reminiscence: archaic memories are recalled in these bizarre mother-of-pearl treasures in the Porcelain Museum of the Pitti Palace. The precious and unique pieces that make up this exhibition stimulate a particularly intense immersion in the world of the artist, who proposes here the leitmotif of her sculptural poetics. What she creates is an extraordinary mimesis of reality, courageously underscoring the entity of the mother-of-pearl matter, and passing nonchalantly from experimentation of clearly realistic descriptions to meditations and suggestions of symbolist culture. Her works play on the modification of form and the symbiosis between one material and another: the rediscovered natural fragment, intriguing custodian of archaic memories, is fused with encrustations of silver, rock crystal and red coral that give birth to solemn marine deities, with faces that are no longer monstrous, but real, while still preserving apotropaic meanings and magical powers to ward off the forces of evil, dialoguing with the observer who can thus drink in the memories of lost eras.

Fantasies of aquatic worlds, where biological evolution launched that mysterious process that uninterruptedly renews the miracle of life, are evoked through complex workmanship and meticulous selection of materials. Even when the work may appear to be of a manner already expressed or familiar, the precious colour effects and nuances provoke original novel sensations, capable of generating a new – fascinating and possible – rivalry between Nature and Art.


Hours
8.15 – 16.00 (November February)
8.15 – 17.00 (March)
8.15 – 18.00 (April, May, September and October)
8.15 – 17.00 (in the month of October when Daylight Saving Time ends)
8.15 – 19.30 (June August)

Closed on the 1st and the last Monday of each month, New Year's Day, May 1st and Christmas Day.