Vincenzo Mascia

Italia • Italy

Things are born of necessity and of chance, Alighiero Boetti, tapestry.

Vincenzo Mascia, the Italian Madì par excellence, is well aware of this concept which he interprets in this way: “The Italian word for chance, caso, is the anagram of caos, or chaos: so things are also generated from chaos, from the primordial big bang that gave rise to the universe. Man’s activity is nothing more than a continuous reorganisation of chaos.

Cultivating meant selecting useful plants and making order in the chaos of natural forms. Living meant cataloguing and making order in one’s needs and dedicating specific spaces to each human activity... town planning organises and seeks to create order in our cities... Other human sciences also create order in chaos. Psychology and psychoanalysis even try to create order in our thoughts and impulses. So, deep down, man always lives in this perennial contrast, in this dialogue between irrational impulse and rational order”.

Things are born of chance, and chance, as such, cannot be programmed; indeed, it is often generated from the chaos of things. Artistic sensitivity is well aware of these connections, sometimes limits, but often a source of upset and interior searching that results in Art, or that lives thanks to Art; other times they may generate discipline, style and technique of absolute precision, dictated by the desire to give order to features, forms, objects and life. Also the search for equilibrium of all that is unconsciously generated form chaos or chance.

There is a limit between nature and artifice, between nature and culture, but not between art and architecture or design, if these forms of expression have the same matrix.

Mascia is the demonstration of how artistic movements, either intentionally or by chance, approach architecture, town planning and the objects we use in everyday life, in a two-way relationship of continuous contamination. Mascia as an artist of well-defined geometrical shapes and decompositions, even when they are decomposed. Mascia as a designer, because the typically playful Madì art can have a function even in daily life.

Serena Mormino, Curator