In ceramics, Paolo Staccioli found fertile ground for freely expressing that creative vein that today makes him one of the most original and interesting authors of a formal repertoire in contemporary ceramics. His imagination is now fully free, ready to find vent in the thousands of inventions and sculptural combinations that come to light in this exhibition.

In ceramics, Paolo Staccioli found fertile ground to freely express that creative vein that today makes him one of the most original and interesting authors of a formal repertoire in contemporary ceramics. From the first vases, in which the first horse procession appears (a theme to which the artist will always remain attached), conducted with the moods of a dreamy and fairy-tale fantasy, Staccioli moves on to experiment new forms, modelled with lightness and irony: and here appear the first harlequins, warriors, travellers, dolls, which detach themselves from the two-dimensional surface of the vase to become sculpture. His imagination is now fully released, ready to find vent in the thousands of sculptural inventions and combinations that see the light of day in his studio-atelier in Scandicci. His nature and talent lead him to attempt a particular synthesis between what he has always recognised as his cultural heritage (the world of the Etruscans, with the formal elegance and expressive freshness of pre-classical languages) and the observation of the modern world, arriving at the creation of an iconographic repertoire that transcends the limits of time, to deliver itself to contemporaneity as an expression of playfulness and disenchantment, perennially confident in the variety and multiplicity of linguistic declinations. Sustained by a continuous inventive fluctuation, Staccioli amusedly watches the characters dear to his imagination emigrate from the pedestal of the sculpture, to reappear aboard argonautic boats and carts, or astride a rocking chair, suspended in metaphysical equilibrium. Sculptures that, over the years, acquire ever more powerful plastic masses, gaining a majesty that does not lose its immediacy, regenerated as they are by ever-renewed baths of colour, mirroring the development of forms. Over the years, Staccioli, indulging his now consolidated sculptural vocation, devoted himself to the exploration of the formal properties of bronze, a material that, like ceramics, finds perfect correspondence with the formal, synthetic and stylistic structure of his creations.