Page 4 - Lino Tagliapietra Synchronicity

Essay by Maria Porges
“I need the glass in order to realize what I’m thinking. Actually, the glass helps you in many ways. You must give it the chance to express itself.” Lino Tagliapietra
Lino Tagliapietra is widely recognized as the preeminent glass artist in the world today, known both for his extraordinary mastery of traditional tools, techniques and forms and for his continual innovation with his chosen material. In “Synchronicity,” 24 carefully curated works created between 1998 and 2021 exhibit a characteristic, timeless elegance: the first piece as fresh as the last, and the most recent both as traditional and as innovative as any work Tagliapietra has ever undertaken.
This synchronicity is made all the more remarkable by the fact that he has coaxed his difficult but ultimately rewarding medium into cooperation for more than 75 years. Having begun his first job in a glass factory as a boy of eleven, Tagliapietra is now 88, and for the most part, has finally stepped back from his daily practice of working with a skilled team in a kind of synchronous ballet — each person performing certain tasks perfectly in order to facilitate the creation of each piece. In this show, a wide range of Tagliapietra’s artistic ideas are on view, including several works made just before the Covid shutdown began in 2020. There is also a piece from a new panel series he began to create during the pandemic itself, working in his studio in Murano when he was unable to travel.
Throughout his career, some of his inspiration has come out of his experiences both in his native Italy and his appreciation of visual culture worldwide. The selections in this show include two brilliantly colored examples of his ‘Stromboli’ series, inspired by the Sicilian island and its volcano that both bear the same name. Made from transparent glass, the simple, almost rectangular forms of these wide-necked vessels serve as a perfect ‘canvas’ for a cascade of vividly-colored murrine1, each one containing a combination of hues. The shape of these vessels may not echo the conical form of Mt. Stromboli, but the brilliant eruption of what seems like every possible color in the rainbow is Tagliapietra’s deliberate allusion to one of Italy’s three active volcanoes.
Three pieces made using the temperamental but spectacular kind of glass known in Italian as avventurina 2 include an extraordinary vessel/sculpture titled ‘Avventurine Batman.’ On either side of a tiny neck, baroque-looking flourishes of the golden, crystalline aventurine glass rise up, curling delicately at their ends, suggesting an Italianate version of the instantly recognizable “bat signal” used to call the caped superhero into action. Red and blue murrine flow between these two ends, contributing to the piece’s fantastic sense of movement, both humorous and compelling — looking almost as if it is about to take off. Similarly, the extravagantly-curling shapes of two examples of the ‘Fenice’ series suggest flight: in this case, of a phoenix, its brilliant colors rising out of the flames from which these mythical birds are said to be born.
4 SYNCHRONICITY | Lino Tagliapietra