Meeting
When I think of Luciano Vistosi, I immediately see an Italian spirit made up of enthusiasm, imagination, joy in working and creating, and living with passion despite sometimes difficult times. An Italian spirit of ‘anything is possible’. I look back at the generation of artists, designers and filmmakers active in Italy over the last century, who gave rise to important movements that continue to influence the present day, such as Futurism, Arte Povera, Neorealism and Memphis.
Luciano Vistosi mi riporta anche a un mondo indimenticabile, a una bellezza arcana, velata di una certa malinconia, come può esistere e nutrirsi soprattutto a Venezia. I am convinced that the aesthetics, the proportions of the architecture, the light, the colours of the lagoon and his hometown greatly influenced him as an artist, but also as a human being. Vistosi was a profound aesthete and lover of style, which made spending time in his company pleasant and enjoyable. His beautiful studio was a fascinating world, where he became one with his works.
Each of these things seems to have found an outlet in his artistic work.
In his work, Vistosi was primarily searching for the perfect form in which lines close in on themselves in an infinite continuum. He could spend hours on his red wooden chair reflecting in front of a sculpture, deciding what the next step should be, and then the next one after that. It seemed that for him, each work was a world unto itself, with its own story.
The material he used was secondary to him. ‘If I had been born in Tuscany,’ he used to say, ‘I would certainly have worked with marble.’ However, having accompanied him professionally for the last fifteen years of his life, I had the feeling that the question of material was important to him nonetheless. He loved working with light and transparency, creating a mysticism that would have been unattainable without the characteristics of glass.
The risk of the material dominating his work gave rise to a love-hate relationship with glass. Raised in a family of Venetian entrepreneurs who owned a glassworks, Vistosi was exposed to the material from a young age, and it seemed obvious to him to create with what he had at his disposal. Studying the works he created during his sixty-year professional career, one can grasp his pioneering spirit and profound knowledge of glass science, which led him to abandon all constraints and continually devote himself to new paths.
When discussing his work, Luciano Vistosi often said, not without idealism: ‘Until the end of my life, I never stopped learning.’
Daniela Schonbachler