Elisabetta Bovina and Carlo Pastore trained at the Istituto Superiore per le Industrie Artistiche in Faenza and founded Elica Studio in 1990. They have not set themselves any disciplinary boundaries: in fact, they have created projects, objects and actions in the fields of ceramics, jewellery, textiles, fashion and costume, graphics, set design and performance, and have written and spoken as militant critics of design and applied arts. Noted nationally and internationally for their eclecticism always high quality, have managed to participate and be invited to exhibitions, commercial and cultural, of great importance, such as the Salone del Mobile in Milan, “Maison et Objet” in Paris, and the official exhibition of the Committee Italy 150 Artisans Tomorrow. Il futuro nelle mani (The future in the hands) held in Turin in 2011 and dedicated to the excellence of our country’s artistic crafts. Their artifacts are both self-produced and designed for other brands, they currently design for Arcolaio and Visionnaire and collaborate with the magazine “Ossigeno”.
It ‘s the need to do, a kind of “magnificent obsession”, it’s the need to tell stories, our own, writing them on objects. Applied project for an Applied Art, drawing as catharsis, the luck of being able to see the sky in a room.
It ‘s the idea of making with the hands with exclusivity, eccentricity, a formal research. A vase, apparently banal, is a vase, it’s just a vase, it’s a vase.
With a “touch” one touches everything, from a distance, and the implicit eroticism of objects, enjoying with the eyes while touching with the hands, is extinguished because art is a vice, not a virtue. Vase as an ideal book, pages of tales, a diary of stories, of fables, of spells, of journeys, real and imagined. Stories that someone has told before us and someone else will tell after us.
It is our chance to waste time, walking with imagination to escape the darkness and comfort ourselves with the dull sound of emptiness.
We try to make objects with our hands so as not to lose the taste for discovery, because everything is exhibited, shown, shared. We work with porcelain, an idea of white that encloses the black of a deep night and also the sun of a summer day, because porcelain can bear everything: the battles of emperors, dreams of love, an ordinary day.
Completely invented symmetries, completely invented geometries, lines and dots and completely invented figures, leaves and flowers and completely invented colors, perhaps, stolen from nature, to escape the darkness and the shadow of uselessness. Time flows slowly with porcelain, days of water, days of plaster, days of air and, finally, fire, 2,3, 5, 7 days of heat, 1260°C, and slowly fire grants immortality to porcelain.
On ceramics there is everything, as in poems and songs, wrote Ettore Sottsass, and we can do very little to escape the darkness, we can only make ceramics.
Only make vases. Vases.