ENLIGHTENED STONE ART RESIDENCY

The stone radiates, it tells stories and reveals itself to the artist.

Every creative journey starts with a place. A mystical and geographical place you fell in love with, that you may feel and breathe. The journey undertaken by contemporary artist Roberta Busato has started in Volterra, since her first unexpected encounter with Alabaster: hidden colours, veins and mineral inclusions are intrinsic to this timeless stone, a reflection of the identity of the Etruscan city across past and present civilizations. 

Video by Vittorio Marrucci

Great part in the making of the ENLIGHTENED STONE exhibition, alongside the curatorial direction of Kalpa Art Gallery and Eleonora Raspi, played the priceless intellectual and material support of Roberto Bianchi, the owner of Romano Bianchi Alabastro in Volterra. Busato has spent a summer art residency at the Bianchi family’s Podere Escaia, a magical place of bucolic dwellings and gardens, immersed in the wild nature surrounding Volterra: the perfect backdrop for a deep insightful creative act, contemplation and reconnection to the inner-self. All of this is part of Busato’s process of unveiling the core of the material, or precisely what it leads her to reveal to human eyes.

“Where is it leading me?” The artist asks herself, embracing Michelangelo’s attitude of the sculptor towards his material. Busato immediately establishes an intimate and respectful relationship with Alabaster, stroke by stroke, sanding after sanding, discovering the secret it hides. Each sculpture tells a story of the different minerals and chemical compositions of the soil, revealed through the shades of colour or its veins. 

While presenting different angles of the same identity, each sculpture is repeated in the context of the rituals, namely of the snake, of healing, of the wind, of silence and of knowledge.  Five moments belonging to the sacred sphere, discovered by Busato in the spiritual essence of alabaster. Ancient rites and ancient beliefs, handed down to our own day, take on a new form and be reinterpreted, establishing an unusual connection between past civilizations and today’s anthropocentric society.

ROBERTA BUSATO

Roberta (Verona, 1976) works and lives in Mantova and Pietrasanta. She attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Carrara where she graduated in Painting in 2004, under the supervision of Omar Galliani. In addition to her studies, she started a collaboration with the Theatre Company “Societas Raffaello Sanzio”. During these years of study and research, Roberta pursued a multidisciplinary approach to her work, by integrating drawing with painting, sculpture with theatre. Her interest in experimenting with different mediums such as painting, photo and video led her to research and expand her artistic outcome on tridimensional sculptural works. 

Busato creates by hand, modelling a compound of natural elements, carved and dried raw earth and various stones. Raw earth is the main material used in her work, together with a new interest in the “stone” of alabaster. The artist’s process of defining, dialoguing and shaping the material stands at the core of her creative research and carries the marks of a primordial and universal gesture. Her language addresses topics such as representation of the inner self and uncertainty of human existence, and emphasises references to ancient forms and languages through an exciting dialogue between finito and non-finito.

Since 2000, she has been invited to present her work in group exhibitions in Venezia, Mantova, Lucca, Livorno, Torino, Carrara e Bologna; in 2020 Galleria Susanna Orlando in Pietrasanta organized her second solo show Domestic Renaissance in her gallery space, after having shown her work in “The Others Art fair” of Turin in 2019. In 2018 her artworks became part of Oliver Gustav Studio’s collection, Copenaghen. In 2019, Roberta was invited by the Henraux Foundation (Querceta, Lucca) to create a new work together with new robotic technology. Today, Busato’s artworks are exhibited in Kalpa Art Living art gallery in Volterra.