Bertozzi & Casoni. Epifania

ML Fine Art is pleased to present the exhibition 'Bertozzi & Casoni. Epiphany', opening Thursday October 27 at our gallery in Via Montebello 30, Milan.

Ceramic works presented in the exhibition, created between 2010 and 2022, propose a reflection on the reality of consumerism, paying particular attention to the elements of waste, interpreted with irony and realism. The work of the artists addresses the major themes of contemporary society and suggests new readings on the socio-cultural, economic and political phenomenon of our time.

Bertozzi & Casoni deliver iconographically improbable, but highly credible works with allusions to a theatre of the absurd that is increasingly ingrained in everyday life. The research work stems from an extremely intellectual and sophisticated artisanal practice, and is constantly confronted with aesthetic-artistic theories. Each reference, replica or glance towards the past corresponds to an invention, a paradoxical ironic touch, full of quotations, self-referential, capable of combining sophisticated techniques and technologies: "a reproduction truer than the truth".

Giampaolo Bertozzi and Stefano Dal Monte Casoni have been working together since 1980 in Imola under the Bertozzi & Casoni company, a formula that goes beyond the simple artistic collaboration and that has characterised from the outset a production that is extremely careful to find a precise and, at the same time, sophisticated collocation in the art world. Precise because in the production of Opificio Bertozzi & Casoni, in the moments of greatest ideal and operative sharing, an interest in the less usual aspects of contemporary art making can be seen, between executive perfectionism and the possibility of technical and formal results never before attempted or achieved. Sophisticated because a medium that is in a certain sense anomalous for contemporary art, ceramics, was chosen.

The ceramics and majolica painted in the studio-laboratory in Imola became the basis for an endless series of experiments and innovations. The primary archaic material of ceramics, which materialises the idea of form by combining the elements of earth, water and fire, is adapted to the new requirements of an artistic operation reformulated on contemporary conceptual canons.

Between compositional surrealism and formal hyperrealism, Bertozzi & Casoni have for years been investigating the waste of contemporary society, not excluding cultural and artistic waste, in a mise-en-scene of endless references in which they alternate between sinking into decay and discovering surviving or misunderstood beauty, abstraction and figuration, impermanence and eternity, history and contemporaneity, fantastic imagination and technical precision.