Cosmos - written by Domenico Iaraca’

Emptiness and fullness, attraction and repulsion: Silvia Granata’s sculpture-like installations are strongly innovative, generating as they do a cosmos that has no equals in the international world of ceramics. What the artist creates with her orbits, star showers and solar systems is a complex world, or a set of universes. Far from being driven by a mimetic purpose, Granata pursues the pleasure of a balancing act in which what matters is not so much the single piece as the relationships between the various units. The artist’s research has always focused on the dynamic links between the single elements and the whole –perhaps symbolizing the interconnections holding together individuals and their communities, in an art that is almost inadvertently relational.

Porcelain, a material with age-old traditions, is reinterpreted here with unprecedented results: lightly hollowed and corroded surfaces alternate with compositions like 23, whose constituent elements are multiplied so that the overall structure of the work is fragmented into its single components. On the basis of the weight in grams of each element, the installation becomes a sum of prime numbers – a series of elements which can only be divided by themselves, or, to use a Greek term with deep resonance, a series of atoms. Thus, the work can be seen as a perfect representation of individuality – which, at subatomic level as well as in the socio-aesthetic sphere of art, only becomes meaningful in interaction.

In a very deliberate manner, Silvia Granata limits the material possibilities of her research: the full richness of colour is reduced to a few rarefied pastel tones, barely rippling through the dominant white surface. This simplicity, however, is only apparent: the artist’s installations are the result of long, painstaking work, both in the realization of each single element and in the disposition of the whole. Analogously, a single reading is not enough to exhaust the interpretive possibilities of this complex art: just like pouring rain or a flickering flame, Granata’s suspended compositions and concentric orbits lure the eye into a continuous, repeated act of contemplation – whose consequences may be, to quote the title of one of the artist’s works, almost hypnotic.
These works, by their nature, are always changing and re-shaping themselves: if they are represented in a new exhibition, their constituent elements end up following novel trajectories, forming artful dispositions in accordance with the new spaces that contain them, in an incessant search for new and inexhaustible combinations. The title itself, in fact, signifies a complete lack of definite, immutable rules: The only certainty I have is doubt. Here, then, is another key to Granata’s art: seen in this light, its subject is not so much the cosmos itself as the lyrical self – and the cosmic laws represented in the installations become a language expressing the harrowing uncertainties of that self. In this sense, the artist’s research must be seen as humanistic, as well as relational: while seeming to describe the world surrounding humanity, the artist is really talking about humanity itself.

Domenico Iaracà