Showcasing Swallow in Flames, a project by Paola Gandolfi and Le Sibille, during Roma Jewelry Week 2023
by Le Sibille
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For over 30 years, Le Sibille have been experimenting, like in an alchemical laboratory, with materials, stones, and metals, transmuting them and giving artistic value to their collections. Their jewelry becomes objects for the coffee table or to be admired like architectural works, capable of inspiring or astonishing the attentive eye of the observer, who intuits and sees transversely, captured in vibration by colors and artistic forms.
Le Sibille couldn’t help but embrace this magnificent project, dedicated to women, seemingly, but also and above all, to all Humanity, without political, religious, and gender divisions, sensing the movements of the new generations and above all, the increasingly close and animistic connection that binds us to our Planet, the Blue Planet.
The inspiration of the artist, Paola Gandolfi, has found us in synergy with the powerful messages that unite us and has pushed us to experiment with new volumes, techniques, and dimensions. The combination of precious metals and the fusion of vitreous pastes (the fluid union of the 4 elements of life: water, air, earth, fire) and, in some cases, the use of gemstones, create true “talismans” that, as in ancient times, beneficially influence the biorhythm and the psychophysical well-being of humans, a sort of visible and tangible shamanic healing for the most evolved Humans.
Paola Gandolfi, LE SIBILLE and the Swallow in Flames
Two ways of understanding art can coexist, influencing each other, especially when the desire to share a project with values considered common is at stake. Thus, Paola Gandolfi encounters Le Sibille, two female worlds played on the invisible thread of different experiences to be put into a stimulating relationship. On one hand, Paola’s relentless exploration of the female psyche, with incursions of a primordial nature as essence of uncontaminated life, are among the elements of her experimentation; on the other hand, the precious and refined use of an ancient craft system with a strong expressive vein, the language of intricate mosaic used by Le Sibille.
The result reveals a path of forms of great evocative power, a complex game of narratives that Paola desires to transform into expressiveness to be worn, after having extensively investigated them in the dimensions of painting, ceramics, and video art. The experience seems to refer to paths already taken, when in the 1960s and 1970s, skilled artisans of the Roman scene were called upon by the jeweler Masenza to become translators of the ideas of famous avant-garde artists into the reduced dimension of jewelry.
The relationship between the two worlds, that of pure art (Paola Gandolfi) and cultured manual skill destined to become a high-profile expressive form (Le Sibille), marks the continuity of a Roman story with an international sign, as the phenomenon of Artist Jewelry is to be considered such due to the interest of an increasingly widespread collecting.
Thus, a microcosm comes to life in which the elements of nature aspire to become positive energy, science merges with art, ideas take shape and strength in feminine essence, leaving room for the artifice of the hand to translate the multiple mutations of the inspirational codes used to control the craft.
The chromatic ranges take on the semblance of minute tiles, a consequence of the studied production of thousands of slender filaments carefully selected. The micro-tiles aggregate into a magical videorama that returns to the perception of the eye the atmospheric movement. The shapes become now flaming swallows, now intertwined arboreal forms resting on the female body, as a protective nature desires to exalt the feminine sentiment that governs it.
The narrative becomes hyperbole, a sort of curve of time that from the roots of origins, from the ovule that fertilizes and generates new nature, reaches a future time, in which man seems to have lost control by inventing tools of death, but still nature translates that negative form into new rebirth and hope.
Skilled hands dictate the times of creativity, Le Sibille draw infinite splinters of matter that vibrate in the grazing light, and in the patient weaving becomes a tale of hope. Art dissents, it is excess, a fiery furnace, an icy lake, those who create it desire to amaze, to excite, to generate ecstasy in their immodest audacity.
Claudio Franchi Curator
The wearable sculptures from the project Swallow in Flames will be displayed at Le Sibille’s showroom (via Muzio Clementi 68/b, Rome) during Roma Jewelry Week 2023, October 9th to 15th.
