At BABS Art Gallery, on display from October 1 to November 26: 15 sculpture-jewels and two installations by the Italo-French artist who experiments with resins, natural and precious materials to bring suggestive and provocative creations to life, full of primary energy.

From October 1 to November 26, BABS Art Gallery hosts the solo exhibition of Faust Cardinali (1961), titled Stacco Matto: The jewel as painting. The exhibition— organized in collaboration with Lorenzelli Arte —will present 15 works by the Italo-French artist, a synthesis of the last 10 years of research. It offers a comprehensive view of the deep bond that unites art and jewelry creation throughout his practice.

Son of the informal painter Franco Cardinali (1926-1985), Faust spent his early childhood in Paris before moving near Arezzo, Italy, as a child, where he studied at the Art Institute of Sansepolcro. There, he began to explore goldsmithing and the techniques of working with precious materials.

In the 1980s, his artistic language became a Baroque triumph. He experimented with materials, juxtaposing and layering textures with the alchemical approach that still characterizes his work today. In 1991, he returned to Paris, where he founded, along with a group of international artists, the association “Artsenal,” based in an abandoned factory. Since then, he has been producing monumental installations along with unique, wearable sculptures, which he has showcased at the Ircam Centre Georges Pompidou (1998), the Palais de Tokyo (2017), and the MAD – Musée des Arts Décoratifs (2018).

His jewelry, now featured in the most prestigious public and private collections around the world (from the Louvre to private collections such as those of Diane Venet, Solange Thierry de Saint Rapt, François Laffanour), are complex objects that follow the thread of his poetic reflection on the integration of opposites: visible and invisible, speakable and unspeakable, ordinary and rare. The contrasts are expressed, for example, in the non-hierarchical choice of materials. Metals, plant elements, and charred bread coexist with gold, silver, and diamonds.

The rings on display at BABS Art Gallery share this characteristic. In many cases, their central part is made of aluminum—a material that the artist ennobles through special casting processes that make it thin and luminous like mother-of-pearl. As Faust explains, the gold and set diamonds are given a reserved, introverted space, but overall, each element coexists in perfect balance, without one overpowering the other.

In much of his jewelry work, as in painting, Cardinali uses a polyvinyl liquid, which he refers to as “a sap, a second skin of the works.” Under this milky transparency, which covers the works like a veil, every other element is revealed, emerges, lives, and pulsates. On display, for example, is the “Plastica Moralia” series of brooches (2016-2024), where wooden twigs are immersed in resin and mounted with precious stones, creating the effect of fossilized objects.

The echo of Dadaism and Surrealism research manifests in the choice of indocile shapes, which seek another narration of the present. For instance, the “Botellum” series of bracelets, also on display, is made of silver and recalls the flexible bodies of snakes. Sinuous lines that also return in the three curved daggers, specifically made for the exhibition, because, as Cardinali explains, “every piece is a free field. And so a piece of jewelry can also be a tool, which, if necessary, could be used for defense.” Pendants and brooches feature stones set in the folds of metals, worked with the “hot-cut” technique, appearing like small, unsettling eyes.

The exhibition of Faust Cardinali was also conceived as a performative event, with the artist returning multiple times to work inside the gallery. On the left wall of the exhibition space is a long gutter where polyvinyl liquid floats. By activating its flow and mixing it with colored powders, the artist will use the dripping resin to create paintings on embossed aluminum boards. On the right side of the gallery is the “Spazzamatrix” installation, a scenic composition of 12 street sweepers’ brooms immersed in resin and covered with metallic powders, “which illuminate them and make them shine,” explains the artist. “They are remnants of memory, suspended in time. These resin polyvinyl stalactites/stalagmites reunite past, present, and future, representing a simulacrum of absolute time.”