An absolute neutrality - written by Roberta Bertozzi

One of the ways in which an artist’s vocation – or, in other terms, their style – is expressed lies in the particular intelligence with which they relate to the instruments of their art. The repetitiveness, almost tautological, of gestures; the familiarity that is established with certain materials; the very act of shaping as a precise structure upon which vision is tempered: all these aspects gradually contribute to outlining a specific compositional horizon, characterized by the pursuit of an idea of absolute neutrality – a reflection of a process that seeks to align its practice with the “naturalness” of the material.

All this, in my view, is most clearly evident in the work of Silvia Granata, where the artist’s persistence manifests in an operative continuity seemingly aimed at offering the ceramic element the freedom to obey its own internal rules – its invisible, because organic, affinities.

The result is a series of micro-sculptural installations in which porcelain presents itself to our gaze as if endowed with an autonomous plastic intentionality, independent from any external shaping will. This effect emerges through numerous signs, not least the fact that in these works the ceramic medium, once a mere support destined for decoration, is emphatically translated into a structural element, strongly highlighting the intimacy between form and matter – how, ultimately, it is matter itself that determines its form. Following a path articulated around miniaturized volumes and their successive concatenations, what comes to the fore is precisely this reciprocal relationship: there is no gap between the physical matrix of the ceramic and its operational performance; the matrix is the form, and the compositional process becomes nothing but the outcome of an infinite fragmentation of its physical and chemical potentialities.

Through descending or ascending architectures, filaments and serial chains, balancing weights and counterweights, always pursuing a linear rhythm free from shifts in intensity, matter organizes itself according to a formal principle that reflects its molecular imprint: polyhedra, prisms, and nuclei orchestrated in eurhythmic arrangements, condensing through covalent, helical, algebraic bonds. It is an expressive syntax that privileges the single syllable rather than the mass, that insists on separation, on the progressive detachment of each detail from the whole, until it enters a specifically determined arrangement – until it inserts itself into a material and spatial complex as an inalienable part of it.

This fragmentation, further reinforced by the chromatic atonality of the installations, is the sign of a tapered, delicate visual poetics, perhaps comparable to a kind of sculptural haiku: the same suspension of the image’s meaning, the same carefully measured metric structure, the same sublime equilibrium that exists entirely on the surface. In this way, by filigreeing porcelain, thinning it, reducing it to an epidermic thickness entirely devoid of resonance, Silvia Granata ultimately delivers to us a sample of the pure sensibility of matter – and in particular of that matter which has passed through the selective (and objective) filter of the emotion inherent in the nature of things.

Roberta Bertozzi