"if you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you"
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche.
The ARTCIRCLE project.
My name is Massimiliano, founder of INSILVIS, a small Italian company dedicated to producing high-end art and design objects.
I live and work in north-eastern Italy, a region with a rich history and culture, as well as ever-changing landscapes of mountains, hills, plains, lakes, and sandy and rocky coasts.
Historical events, dating back to the Middle Ages, have left tangible traces in these places, evident in the buildings and the landscape. These traces also exist on a more subtle, energetic level, like distant echoes that still resonate today.
Paradoxically, the more distant this echo seems, the more it is linked to the contemporary world in an alienating diachronic imminence.
In my daily work in art design, I constantly experience time as an elastic, almost kaleidoscopic dimension: rooted in history, yet also projected towards the contemporary.
While time corresponds to our perception of things, it does not belong to the fundamental structure of the universe and has no objectivity or absoluteness.
This means we find ourselves immersed in a sea of subjectivity where evidence emerges in seemingly anarchic and unpredictable dynamics that are sometimes physical and sometimes almost phantasmagorical. These dynamics allow us to measure our time.
Although we are alone, we instinctively seek 'travelling companions': people with whom we can share experiences that generate harmony and consonance in perception, if not coincidences.
This desire gave rise to the ART CIRCLE project, which is a creative dialogue between teachers and former students of the Scuola Mosaicisti del Friuli. This school is located in the ancient medieval village of Spilimbergo, where I teach digital modelling.
The project involves creating art design objects with a specific function: each object is handcrafted in a small series and reinterpreted by each artist as a unique, numbered piece.
The first object is a circular wall coat rack, which inspired the name of the project: ART CIRCLE.
The name has a dual meaning:
On the one hand, it evokes the artistic circle as a gathering of friends and colleagues who share creative interests.
On the other hand, it refers to the artistic circle in a geometric and symbolic sense, representing harmony, continuity and completeness in art and creativity.
The artists' training and professional background explains why many of the artistic interpretations recall techniques and sensibilities linked to mosaic art.