SCULTURE DA INDOSSARE

Ugo Nespolo

17/09/2019 – 08/11/2019

The imperative of contamination distinguishes the work of Ugo Nespolo since the first years of its production. Already at the end of the 70s, the Piedmontese artist, faithful to the avant-garde dictate of “bringing art into life”, identifies design and applied arts as the way to bring the artist down from his pedestal and bring him back among the people; This is also because, in his voracious curiosity, there is no material support and there is no language (from the cultured one of art to the popular one of television) that he did not want to explore to get closer to the truth. Here then, after the countless “incursions” in applied production that have marked his eclectic career (from the advertising graphics for Campari and Rai, to the colorful sets of majolica cups for Richard Ginori, to the collaboration with the historic glassworks of art Barovier & Toso Murano, through the limited editions of the BMW K1 and the Fiat 500, up to the Swatch watches), Nespolo finally chooses to broaden his investigation to include the artist’s jewel.

The one created for BABS is a collection that pays tribute to the playful, whimsical and countercurrent of the artist from Biella: as in his long career he has never wanted to deny himself anything of the experimentation that crosses transversally the history of the art of the second Twentieth century, sounding with lucid irony the material perspectives of Arte Povera, those conceptual Fluxus, the instances of bright pop colorism of Warholian imprint and that experimental cinema that his friend Baj had defined “to fragmented emotion”, so in the jewel Nespolo plays with materials, shapes and colors maintaining the same disregard for the respect of the rules and the constant refusal of a dogmatic cage to the free to create: recurring themes of his research return, which draw inspiration from his colorful and eclectic works exhibited all over the world, as the theatrical enchantment of its assemblages, which add artifice to the artificial (so appear earrings inspired by the famous puzzles, rings depicting urban landscapes, bracelets-brush, solid to fit as a logical challenge…); even in the golden declination returns in short the essential idea that art is basically a playful exercise aimed at wonder and that therefore the role of the artist, also through a precious support as the jewel of the artist of which Nespolo provocatively “demolishes” the seriousness, is simply to let us return to play.