ART STVDIO SANDRO BECVCCI
After more than 20 years, I once again have a Lab-Studio-Gallery where I can work with all those means and techniques I have used throughout a life dedicated to the visual arts, bringing together in a single physical, mental and spiritual space what has always been my vocation for the visual and, I would say, scenic arts, first with ‘I Maschereri Atelier’ for more than 30 years, then with painting alone for many more.
For the set-up of this ‘not only physical’ space, I was aesthetically and functionally inspired by the Renaissance workshop, dividing the space into three rooms with different functions.
Two large overhangs on the street make as many rooms clearly visible. The GALLERY serves as the entrance and permanent exhibition; it communicates with the other environment visible from the street: the STUDIO for painting, design, drawing and applied arts. Both rooms lead to the LABORATORY located at the back and equipped for sculpture and modelling, mould and negative moulding; support work such as carpentry and metal carpentry; decoration, storage and finally EDUCATION: courses of various kinds on papier-mâché techniques. This is where I get my heart, head and hands to work together; this is where design emotion and execution technique meet and merge into the finished work. I believe that without all three of these elements there is neither art nor artist.
In the Renaissance, the concept of the artist as we understand it today did not exist, but was formed around the figure of the ARTE-FICE, a member of an ‘ARTE’, a master possessing talent, technical knowledge and entrepreneurial skills such that he was able to coordinate a workshop full of workers, pupils and apprentices who carried out works of the most varied entities and qualities under his close supervision.
In their workshops, Renaissance masters used drawing painting, sculpture, modelling, decoration, weaving; supporting trades such as carpentry, mechanics, construction, tailoring, theatrical machinery etc.
Long before Andy Wharol The Bottega Rinascimentale invented and developed the concept of the art multiple and serial production to meet the demand of the lower classes.
In order to create ephemeral or low-cost works, many of them, such as Sansovino, Donatello, the Della Robbia, and Bernini himself in the Baroque century, developed papier-mâché techniques with which they mainly made bas-reliefs moulded in plaster casts, but also sculptures in the round, with some parts (hands, head, feet) made from moulds, and others such as the drapery, modelled freehand directly on a straw puppet supported by a wooden or iron armour, exactly as the many unknown masters of statuary art did and still do today, especially those from Lecce.
I had the good fortune to breathe this atmosphere live when in 1978 I attended a wonderful seminar in Viareggio at the hangars of the ‘Carristi di Prima Classe’ of the Viareggio Carnival where, in addition to these, the builders of the famous ‘Cabezudos’, huge light and hollow heads, to be worn in the festivities were invited from Barcelona; and from Lecce the famous Indino, a very good master of Lecce Statuary Art.
In those hangars full of huge, self-propelled papier-mâché sculptures, half disassembled, with their theatrical machinations shamelessly unveiled to my enchanted gaze, I received yet another epiphany, an imprinting and a wonderful gift enclosed in my inner self, in my personal Artist's Den, in my Creative Forge, where everything is neat and tidy on the shelves and after half an hour everything is upside down: tables and shelves filled with jars, moulds, half-open boxes revealing their strange contents; 3-4 easels with works in the middle, modelled wet and covered, waiting to be finished, where I wander (today alone but once among my employees), busy and focused on starting, finishing, finishing ... a project, an idea; here I can show the client what work and the pleasure of doing it really is, because the first reward is the pleasure of creating, of making art, even suffering, making mistakes and redoing, and then overcoming the difficulties by giving birth to the work, painting, sculpture, papier-mâché, cement-marble, wood or plaster artefacts.
