In the Muranese Fashion: New Glass from Mattia and Marco Salvadore

Current work by Mattia and Marco Salvardore of
 StudioSalvadore, at the Sherrie Gallerie
 in Columbus, through July 31, 2013.

In March of 2012, I was introduced to the astonishing work of Muranese master glass artist Davide Salvadore at the Sherrie Gallerie in Columbus. This summer, Sherrie Hawk is showing work from his sons, Mattia and Marco, who work cooperatively at their Studio Salvadore in Murano. Murano is the traditional island site of Venetian glass works, where today's techniques have continuously developed since the 16th century.

The Salvadore brothers' sculptures capture color and light, transferring to them the molten look their medium once had, when it emerged super-heated from the kiln. The artists concentrate on a few forms—simple, graceful elliptical shapes ideal for framing the layered currents of color that swim through their depths.

Those colors are, in fact, one of the first things that caught my eye as I looked through the room toward the large front window, the natural source of illumination for all the work. The palettes are fresh and, above all, struck me as young. Young: as in springlike (leaf green, sky blue, buttercup yellow), but also as in hip. 

Mattia and Marco Salvadore, Opera 13. 
Blown and carved glass.

A signature of Studio Salvadore is swathes of color encased in transparent glass with large murrine applied on the surface. Murrine are the slices from canes the glassmaker forms for this purpose. Disks cut from the canes will make beautiful, circular decorations, all alike—like filled cookies cut from a roll. The Salvadores apply murrine at the end of the glassblowing process, so they sit boldly on the surface of the vessel. The small variations in size have to do with distortions consequent on working with high temperature materials.

Detail of murrine on Opera 13

The application of murrine is not the last step of decoration. Once the piece is entirely cool, then its surface is carved. This step is yet another opportunity for the worker to make the slip that would destroy so labor- and technique-intensive a work of art. These pieces are highly vulnerable to error and serendipity at every step of the process. They requires the artist's confident and unerring hand at all stages, from super-heated fluid to rock-like solid. I wonder how many pieces like the ones in this show are attempted for each one realized?

I'll return to my perception of the youthful air about Studio Salvadore's work. Fashionable is the word that actually describes the feeling I have about this body of work. The fact that nearly all of the work is similar in size, shape, and distinctive motif brings to mind an up-to-the-minute, fresh fashion collection presented on the elegant curves of uniform models. The colors and their satiny flourishes within the vessels give the air of draped or folded fabrics. This effect is spectacularly enhanced by the details of carving. In Opera 13, the horizontal surface waves atop the lime green give the effect of a pleated, silken sash. 

Opera 5 is the most translucent piece in the Sherrie show. Its swirling, interlocked patterns of

Mattia and Marco Salvadore, Opera 5. 
Blown and carved glass.

carved surface designs respond to the movement and shapes of the color designs. On top of the simpler areas of pale violet, though, the carving gives the feeling that quilting stitches do on fabric. The effect is not that we necessarily focus on the troughs left where glass has been excised. Rather, their edges define soft spaces in the way that quilting stitches define and gently gather tiny pouches of fabric. I see that this is similar to the effect of stitchery on fine, sheer fabric. Not only does the extra surface detail add the beauty of subtle design, but it piques with the illusion of transparency. Perhaps we could see through this were it not for those marks? There is a seductive element created by the intersection of translucence and the fine shadowy marking of the carved or stitched lines. 

Opera 5 is high fashion in its sensuous, seductive use of color and pattern; design elements subtle and bold; and materials the hand can barely resist caressing. It has the sex appeal that makes you want to get closer, and the attitude of couture that enforces distance as part of its allure.

Mattia and Marco Salvadore, Opera 8. 
Blown and carved glass.

Gazing at this beautiful show, then, from the back of the room, is like enjoying the pages of Italian Vogue, or enjoying a Fashion Week party in Milan, Paris, or New York. It is fresh, beautiful, new, and exciting. A wonderful show of exquisite glass!

I mention a vantage point from the back of the room not only for the view into the dazzling grouping of Studio Salvadore glass, but also because there sit on display three pieces remaining from the elder Salvadore's spring 2012  Sherrie Gallerie show.

At the time, I was disconcerted by Davide Salvadore's show because very little of his work looked like glass. His works tend to have matte surfaces which, while minutely and brilliantly decorated, nevertheless appear to be made of inlaid wood or leather. His forms, too, are unconventional, having the appearances of imagined musical instruments or dreamed "ancient" vessels. If the sons' sculptures are sleek,  young, and stylish, the father's seem almost curmudgeonly in their astonishingly wrought singularity.

Davide Salvadore, detail.
Blown and carved glass.

Mattia and Marco learned their art in their father's studio, Campanol e Salvadore, when they were boys. Both have worked with other masters since, both in Murano and at the famous Pilchuck School in Washington state. It is still clear that their father's influence is deep, being on the surface of the work shown here.

Exquisite glass carving is clearly a shared characteristic. Because the sons are more interested in allowing light to travel through their glass, they use carving almost as another color element, or as an enhancement to the directional flow of color. Because Davide's presentations are nearly always opaque, carving is exterior enhancement. He uses it more architecturally than his sons do.

Both generations apply murrine to the exteriors of their works rather than incorporating it into the hot glass. What different expressions result from the same technique though. The detail from Davide's fantastical instrument shows tightly focused murrine placed in double pairs for an almost classical look. This couldn't be more different from the sons' large, loose, urban tribal tattoos.

Davide Salvadore. Blown and carved
glass.

Sherrie's show of Mattia and Marco Salvadore glass provides a heavenly hour for any person with eyes to see. It is a trip to Paradise. That such pure sensual gratification is generated by so technique-heavy, physically demanding an art form is breathtaking, even as a concept. For the Salvadore brothers to bring us such light and elegant work is most artful indeed.

But their show is enriched for all of us by the three pieces of their father's that remain in the wings. Davide Salvadore's work seems to come from a different planet—the planet perhaps farthest away from youth: Age. The complex uncompromisingness of the elder's work; its depth of concept and design; the visionary quality to his use of materials: All this hearkens to experience with glass and with life too. The strange formality of his work lends a darkness to them that appeals to me. They are not only wonders of process and aesthetics, but repositories of experiences I don't have to know to connect to.

Not that this isn't true for the work from Studio Salvadore. But I am older now. I love beauty, color, youth and fashion. I love especially what I know will continue to sustain me, and I turn to art for this. I embrace especially work that I have to think about before I fall in love with it—the odd or rough, the characteristic, troubling, or off-kilter. Often I find that works with these qualities keep me coming back because they always have more to offer. I may not always "like" them, but I always have a conversation with them about something important. Those conversations may change from month to month, but they don't stop. It doesn't hurt if the works are beautiful, but they don't have to be. They have to keep talking and challenging, though. And they have to bear the deep, indelible mark of their individual maker.

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All photography by the author, with thanks to the Sherrie Gallerie.

Murano Glass Master, Davide Salvadore

Davide Salvatore, Tirata. Author photo.

At his recent opening at the Sherrie Gallerie in Columbus, I asked Davide Salvadore (through his congenial translator), if there is any room for chance in the process of creating his glass works, or if he has everything mapped out before he begins. 


This master glass artist from Murano, the Venetian island that has been the center of glass works since the 13th century, has filled Sherrie Hawk's gallery with enchanting, glass "musical instruments." These have all been conceived from Salvadore's long-ago sight of an African woman carrying a jug on her head, dressed vivid fabrics. The sight fired in him a spontaneous love of Africa. Although he's never set foot on that continent, it has provided deep influence on the imagination that creates his mesmerizing work. 

Tirata, detail

In answer to my question, Salvadore assured me that the work requires that everything be laid out carefully ahead of time. The multiple glass canes that will be fused, all the supplies must be in order for the master and his three assistants (two sons among them) to handle in timely sequence in a process that depends on timing and temperatures. Should anything fail to happen according to plan, he knows enough that he can repair some sorts of errors or amend them, but basically: No. If anything goes wrong, the procedure ends and the work is broken to pieces. The scraps might be used as decorative bits in something else, but there is no question of salvaging work that requires perfection.


I came to Salvadore's show lured by the beautiful card the gallery mailed, which made it quite clear that this was a glass show. Not only is the artist hailed as an "Italian maestro glass artist," but the image of the small, gem-like COCOE (2012, 21.5 x 13 x 7") could never be mistaken for any other medium. 

When I arrived for the opening and looked around, though, the room was dominated by much larger works than this, and I began to conclude that Salvadore worked in several media. The forms were clearly related, but the surfaces were quite different from one another. Kijana was evidently carved from wood, and Tipo was woven from durable grasses or handsome synthetic fiber with shell or wood inlay.

Kijana

Tipo

Of course, they are not. They are glass, and like everything in the show, they are made by a long and arduous process of blowing, joining components, surface finishing and carving. Within one body of work tightly defined by form and spirit, the variety of textures achieved is amazing.  

Wood and leather?

Visitors to the Sherrie Gallery to see this work in person will be able to see Salvadore at work, aided by three assistants, in an excellent video produced by the Corning Glass Museum. Who isn't awed and amazed to watch glass artists at work? There is something deeply stirring about seeing form rescued time after time from molten batches, and precious objects emerging from flame. Artists who work with materials in constant fiery flux, who have to understand rolling, minute changes of state, are alchemists, turning sand almost literally into gold.





Salvadore's love of music inspired him to fashion this series of glass stringed instruments from his imagination. They serve one function of bowls or other open vessels, though, by displaying the artist's mastery over both the interior of the work and exterior of the work. In several cases this has the effect of making me wish I could experience the world in the richly saturated interior light. Once you glimpse the intensity at the core of the vessel, you understand that two works of art have been made simultaneously, one that reflects light back to us with its surface colors and textures, and the other, in the interior vault, that is illuminated by it.




Salvadore told me that he does little drawing to prepare for his work: Mostly, he works from his head. He knows what he wants to do, prepares and executes. 




There are many artists working in many media who "take the plunge," and who set about their work with confidence in themselves and knowledge of their materials. Rarely, though, do artists anticipate a specific end when they work in this manner. The one comparison I can make to glass work at this level is musical composition (unaided by computers). In the composer's ear his materials are arrayed; a commission or a guiding conception helps the composer invent and arrange many complex elements. She thinks about color, texture, design, rhythm, dynamics, orchestration—elements with correspondences one finds in Salvadore's multi-layered work. What the glass-worker must do, though, that the composer rarely does, is work fast and hot, straight through, until the enormously complex design is complete and perfect. There will be no editing, play-back, or consultation. In this, the process is less like composition than like child-bearing—struggle and discipline, but blood and sweat too.

Biubo

Biubo, detail

That the surfaces of the work be "alive and breathing" is paramount for Salvadore. In his statement, he says, " I encourage my audience to have a real encounter with each piece. I want them to touch it, caress it, and to understand the shapes and movements." Five-figure price-tags stand between this viewer and the deep desire to indulge the fingers. The surfaces of these sculptures are every bit as sensual and alluring as their colors and forms. Biubo, less ornately decorated than many of the others, gives us the opportunity simply to swim in the depth of its blue color and to trace the deeply cut rivulets in its surface. Unlike any of the other "African" work, this calls to my hand the way tan elegant woman's sweeping blue taffeta dress would, one decorated with corsages of spring flowers.

This, however, attracts a very different impulse of hand, the combination of hesitation and eagerness one would bring to treasure. I looked very closely at all the work; I am certain that there really is no gold used in any of it. But in this piece, Salvadore has managed to create a precious object from the vaults of Ozymandias. The surface, like many, is cut in a manner that makes it look like beaten metal surrounding the cane lozenges that sit flush with the rest of the glass. The translucent tip of the vessel appears to be a semi-precious stone or crystal. From glass, the artist has created an instrument we would dare to hold only with caressing fascination and awe, as if it had once been plucked by Orpheus.

















 This Tiraboson is among the pieces where Salvadore's African fantasy is most strongly felt. The colors—just those colors of acid yellow-green, vivid red and orange in a lattice of black with a scarf of bright blue—are typical of West African wax cloth and its abstract, assertive patterns. The form though, is unique in this show of uniquely shaped work, for having the terraced, carved belly and neck. The slender proportions of this Tiraboson make me think of a fossil—a paleontologist's gaudy, imagined reconstruction of a seahorse from millennia before nature fell to the degrading uses of humans.




Columbus is a city that loves glass and enjoys its particular relationship with Dale Chihuly. The Franklin Park Conservatory, the city's admirable botanical garden, is punctuated with biomorphic Chihuly sculptures that are much beloved; the Columbus Museum of Art has shown Chihuly in popular shows and owns a spectacular hanging sculpture much like those at the Victoria and Albert in London, at the Corning Glass Museum, the Portland Museum of Art—and who knows how many others. They are crowd pleasers. 

Dale Chihuly from Franklin Park Conservatory
web page

What Salvadore and Chihuly do are completely different things and to a degree it's pointless to compare them. In the video that accompanied Chihuly Illuminated that visited the Columbus Museum of Art in 2009, though, the shots of the workshop presented more of a factory in which assistants produce many multiples of the named, freely-formed shapes from which the artist selects to make sculptures or installations. The process is almost literally the opposite of Salvadore's, in which the wholly-invested artist is present at every step from conception through the final finishing. Chihuly's work is detached by comparison.


The literal weight of Salvadore's work I do not know, but it is substantial in the important sense. Even in photographs one can see that it is ardently formal. It is built up of layers encased in layers; it is so thick that at moments it seems to have felt the bite of a woodsman's axe. The presence of this work is phenomenal. Even the individual colors have mass.

From the show, Chihuly Illuminated, 2009

I bring up a comparison with Chihuly here not because it makes much sense to compare their approaches to glass: They are trying to do different things. 


But I compare them to emphasize the heat and investment of Salvadore's work. It is not literally true that you see the sheen of his sweat on every piece. It is not true that the gemlike colors are saturated with the artist's blood. And it's impossible that the ferocious time compression during Salvadore's labor causes the visual surface vibration in his work.


But every work explodes with life; and every detail is as intentional and as committed as a parent is to a newborn. To experience Salvadore's work is to experience the man who made them. That's to know his passion, integrity, will, and appetite.

All photographs in this article were taken by the author.