14/05/2022
When Gabrielle Ammann, owner of ammann//gallery (Cologne) and founder of ammann//projects (London), discovered the work of Nucleo twelve years ago, she was immediately attracted by the sculptural aspect of its production, its architectonics forms, the tactile quality of the employed materials but also its capacity to create transdisciplinary scenarios and narratives that contextualize each piece within a precise temporality frame and aesthetics. Throughout all these years, the constant dialogue and some constructive frictions have allowed them to trustfully develop a solid partnership, capable of progressing both on the conceptual and technical aspects of the creative process.
Ammann discovered in the approach of Studio Nucleo's Primitive collection a certain similarity with her "radical" Italian friends of the design collective Alchimia, with whom she collaborated in the late '80 and '90. Like Alchimia, Nucleo has the capacity to imagine and organize, in these pivotal years of transition, an autonomous laboratory capable of developing a sustainable, singular and free research of thought and languages. Like the philosopher Umberto Galimberti2 asserts, but before him, of course, John Ruskin and William Morris, "art knows the bending of the inflexible, the prayer of the artist, who asks the solidity of the earth to bend to the instrument. It was in this way that art governed craftsmanship, and it was in this way that, in ages not yet besieged by the technique, the craftsmanship became with the alchemists, a place of knowledge, a transformation of the vile into the precious, where the elements that reached the opus were transformed as much as the soul of the operator, not when he contemplates his work, but when he generates it".
text part 2 by
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Gabrielle Ammann, Piergiorgio Robino and Anna Bernagozzi
