The figures presented here stem from a trip I made to one of the great centers of the Chinese ceramic tradition, Dehua. The city of the goddess Guanyin, the deity we in the West have seen reproduced in porcelain since the eighteenth century by the naval imports that transported white gold to Eastern-fashioned Europe. Augustus the Strong prince-elector of Saxony in the 18th century locked up the alchemist Johann Friedrich Bottger in the Albrechtsburg castle in Meissen, forcing him to find the formula for porcelain since he could no longer buy the Chinese imported one that had cost him so much that he risked bankruptcy and subsequent popular uprising. A combination of quartz, feldspar and the irreplaceable kaolin in secret proportions and porcelain came into the world.  The firing that transforms the raw paste into the hard, transparent porcelain must reach a metaphysical 1300 degrees. Today in industrial society it is an obvious and customary practice, but when porcelain appeared on the market in the Middle Ages it was a technological miracle, which has seduced to this day, everyone who happened to be in its presence.  

My residency stay was within a French-Chinese collaboration under the auspices of the historic designation of the Blanc de Chine International Ceramic Art Award (ICAA) as a leitmotif from which to draw inspiration. During the one-month residency, I produced two series: "Camouflage" and “Neuf Neuve Déesses”.  

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For "Camouflage", I took two 3-D printed figures to China in Rome, and as soon as I arrived, a local skilled artisan made a plaster cast of both of them for me. By that time I could already cast the Chinese porcelain slip and create multiples. This was made possible in the workshop of master Su Xianzhong with whom I arranged to be able to carry out the project by giving me the constant cooperation of his experienced workers and making available to me the entire repertoire of his plaster casts of traditional Chinese sculptures. It was an extraordinary opportunity because I could freely use details of the master's sculptures and decontextualize them in my own sculptures. Thus beards of prophets, muffled clouds, baroque rocks, draperies of buddhas and pagodas in the distance, applied to my figures lost their original meaning to become alienating objects that plunged the entire figure into visual absurdity. My characters lost the reassuring and usual appearance of ordinary citizens of Western society to become hybrid personifications of the metaphysical world. However, especially for using pedestals traditionally associated with Chinese religious sculpture as the bases of the figures and difficult to decontextualize, the pairing came in handy for me to emphasize the relationship between our two cultures that the sculptures were further intended to represent. 

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The "Camouflage" series was born. After the end of the Chinese sojourn that led to the final exhibition of the Blanc de Chine ICAA project before coming to the Frascati venue for this new exhibition adventure, the sculptures had the honor of being exhibited in Meissen in the 2nd Porzellanbiennale in the Albrechtsburg Castle where Augustus of Saxony locked up the poor alchemist to find the precious porcelain formula that would change the fate of European ceramics. They were also displayed in the "In bianco. La porcellana nella ceramica d’arte italiana contemporanea" exhibition, curated by Matteo Zauli and Xiuzhong Zhang at the Palazzo del Podestà in Faenza, Italy.

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For the production of the “Neuf Neuve Déesses” series, I utilised the female press-mould which I had created in another important porcelain city, Jingdezhen, during a residence at the Jingdezhen International Studio in Taoxichuan. The individual statue created from the molds were modified through the edition of the elements founding the factory where the residency studio were based.  As in the case of the "Camouflage" series, I chose to leave the sculptures unglazed to preserve the beauty of the porcelain and to reference the figures of the Blanc de Chine tradition. This series was

shortlisted for the "2020 Taiwan Ceramics Biennial", New Taipei City Yingge Ceramics Museum, Yingge Taiwan and displayed in the biennial "Ethos: Keramikos 2022" at the Museo di Palazzo Doebbing, Sutri, Italy.

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