IOS ON OIO

“Without writing we would be nothing we would not have consciousness of ourselves” says Alfredo Rapetti.

And it is not by chance that the word is the common root of his two professions, of songwriter and painter. Using in his canvases the technique of puntasecca, Rapetti returns value to the act of writing by hand. His “hieroglyphs”, unstructured signs that stand at the center of the monochrome works in a not immediately readable order, are almost engraved on the pictorial film and create a very personal alphabet but at the same time universal, where the word is apparently emptied of all meaning and of its original function, but in which it actually acquires a universal value. If they are given the right weight, words can reconstruct hidden meanings, dictated by the user’s ability to identify the moment he reads the work. As in painting, so in jewelry the artist starts again from the signifier to give life to an unusual and personal alphabet, using different graphic effects (glossy/opaque, flat/protruding) and combinations made possible by pairs (earrings, twins..) to recreate also in the tridimension a newly shaped language: in addition to the linguistic games, the physical presence of the person also creates further displacement between meaning/signifier. It is enough to wear the letters I and O to the two lobes to suddenly rediscover the centrality of one’s being; or, by rotating the wrist, you can identify the word “soul” in the middle of a seemingly random set of letters. Freed from the gravity of its primitive function, the graphic sign also becomes in the jewel an emotional vehicle for those who have the sensitivity to read the hidden power.