Adventures with Materials

It is vernissage time at Nature Morte’s Mumbai outpost once again, and the city’s arterati are flocking to see what gallerist Peter Nagy has brought this time into his new space, which has been designed by Rajiv Saini and is a departure from the white-cube format. Nagy is known to be completely involved with the installation of works in every show he curates and presents, which is probably how he has built up the reputation of this gallery that he ran for six years in New York’s East Village till 1988.

Once you step into the magnificent art deco Dhanraj Mahal building and arrive at the third floor, you enter a voluminous room with a lofty view of the historic Royal Bombay Yacht Club opposite the Gateway of India. However, the view within the gallery itself is even more compelling. It is the golden hour before sunset, and the light streaming in from the wide windows glows on parts of the work displayed, illuminating the incompatible materials converging to create sculptural forms hanging from the high ceiling, displayed on the walls or set on pedestals. Metamorphosis by Italian artist Lorenzo Vitturi evokes a stage and invites you to a theatrical experience, something that Vitturi excels in creating after spending years in Rome as a cinema set painter and designer.

Vitturi has come a long way since then. Piles of different-coloured woven yarn have been snipped into shapes that may seem strange at first. A glinting glass insert pops out unexpectedly from amidst the softness, lending an element of discovery. Photographs capture images of temporary material installations that are ephemeral yet eternal. You encounter works of varied scales, from giant, soft sculptures in suspended animation to a delicate 3D sculpture sporting fractal patterns and geometries.

The glinting glass insert is made from aventurine, a material close to the artist’s heart. His mother used to have a collection of Murano glass eggs, and his favourite was a crystal egg with a fragment of aventurine suspended inside. Young Vitturi spent hours just staring at the magical reflections. Much later, he discovered that this is a precious glass produced in Murano, Italy, as it’s a fusion of glass and fragments of copper; and that it was first produced by accident. The process is difficult, which is why its name means ‘a little adventure’, because you never know what the result will be.

While many artists have made designs for conventional carpets, Vitturi takes the carpet-making process and turns it on its head. As Nagy points out, Vitturi ignores anything about conventional carpets that go on the floor, instead he sees the weaving as a process to create textural compositions. “Textile art is a big trend in the art world these days, but these works stand out from the rest as it seems to relate more to sculpture made out of other materials than other types of textile art,” says Nagy.

The longer you stand in front of each piece, the more you can find to gaze at. And therein lies the pull of these artistic explorations of the tension between what is enduring and impermanent. As the curatorial essay by Giulia Civardi reveals, this collection harks back to the artist’s biographical roots in Italy and Peru, while unveiling the collaborations with artisans in Murano; at the Jaipur Rugs Foundation in India; and indigenous communities in Chinchero, Peru. And so, Murano glass, Peruvian yarns, fishing nets, Indian handmade rugs, eucalyptus wood, cocaine leaves all become unconventional storytellers that speak about lived experience, not just of the artist, but also of the viewers. Much of the artist’s photographic and sculptural oeuvre emerges from everyday interactions and dialogues with local communities and artisans. It also results from his careful study, manipulation, and combination of materials that he selects based on their provenance as well as the historical or cultural narratives they hold.

Nagy encourages viewers to pay attention to Vitturi’s use of colours and textures to create drama within individual works. This includes how he juxtaposes fluffy against flat, solid colours against mixed modulations of various fibres, and the delicate sprinkling of glass beads and Murano glass that add a sense of surprise and wonder.

Vitturi’s expeditions took him from his native Venice and Peru via the film sets of Rome to the world of commercial and fashion photography in Milan, before he decided to base his art practice in a tiny neighbourhood in East London. He set up his home studio in Dalston amidst the busy Ridley Road marketplace that fuelled his ruminations on the merging of different cultures. The turmoil he witnessed during what he refers to as the gentrification of the area, led him to fashion massive female forms and sets out of organic and other market waste. He photographed and published these in 2013 in the book Dalston Anatomy, a tribute to this lively multicultural neighbourhood. The idea was to use photography and sculpture to celebrate its diversity and document the area’s rapid transformation.

By 2018, it became financially possible for Vitturi to focus on Caminantes, his research-based project that combines photography, sculpture, installation, and community engagement. It explores questions of origins, cultural encounters and identity formation, taking as a starting point an event that marked his family history. Vitturi explains, “In the 1960s, my father embarked on a journey through the Atlantic to open a Murano glass factory in Peru. On this trip, he met my mother.” This journey not only birthed his family, but it brought together distant and different worlds in ways that continue to fascinate him.

Years later, he retraced the same itinerary through the Atlantic, travelling with 100kg of cotisso (raw Murano glass) through Lima, the Peruvian coastal desert, the Andes, the Selva, and back to Venice where he grew up. The physical manipulation and combination of cotisso with materials such as pigmented ceramics, fabrics, Andean wools and lagoon waxes, encountered and collected along the way, is aimed to make the viewer reflect on origins and identity preoccupations. These also find a voice in his collaborative work with Jaipur Rugs.

In November 2019, the artist travelled to Rajasthan at the invitation of NK Chaudhary, chairman and founder of Jaipur Rugs and Jaipur Rugs Foundation. There he was met by ‘sculptures’ of rural communities — from agricultural tools to scattered construction materials. The project, called Jugalbandi, was a first collaboration for Vitturi between him and the weavers of the Jaipur Rugs Foundation. These images from rural Indian life were translated and transformed into unique, multi-layered and textured works with photographic documentation assistance. “The designs of the arazzos are the result of collages made by mixing fragments of photographs taken during different journeys. Subjects vary from daily objects to textures of materials and specific locations connected to family history,” elaborates Vitturi.

Nature Morte had been working with Jaipur Rugs on another project, so Nagy was following them on Instagram and saw pictures of these works (from the Jugalbandi collection) that Vitturi had made with them — which were shown at a gallery in Rome. “I immediately thought they were both interesting and unique, so we inquired if he could make another set of works in Jaipur that we could show in Delhi,” explains Nagy.

When Vitturi began to work on the first exhibition for Nature Morte, he discovered that Jaipur has one of the biggest aventurine caves. The material is actually a green mineral, but it was given the same name as the glass. “So, aventurine is a glass… but it is also a mineral! I always like to find these random connections between two completely different places, which in this case was the aventurine,” exclaims the artist.

Following the success of that first show at Nature Morte Delhi in 2022, the gallery invited Vitturi to work on a collection to be shown in Mumbai. It is remarkable that Metamorphosis mirrors his journeys between Peru and Venice; as a series of happy accidents.

(Metamorphosis by Lorenzo Vitturi is on display at Nature Morte, Mumbai till April 27)

3D sculpturecreative expressionculturesItalian artistLorenzo Vitturimaterial exhibit