Title: Lio Messi: The fragments of Barcelona (in Catalan)
A personal project. Studies on Trencadís, pique assiette and mosaics.
A tribute to Lionel Andrés Messi Cuccittini, the city and FC Barcelona.
Barcelona. What a city! Full of art, full of passion, full of beauty.
I have many personal reasons to love the Catalan capital. But personal motivs apart, as an artist with a long time and serious passion for mosaics I couldn't ignore the immense contribution of Barcelona to our art form. So I have decided to dedicate some serious times to study the heritage of Antoni Gaudí, Josep Maria Jujol and many others. I have mainly focused on the Trencadís technique. Trencadís means brittle in Catalan and it's a type of mosaic used in Catalan modernism, created from broken tile shards. Gaudi was using ceramic tiles but also broken parts of dinnerware to decorate his incredible works.
The technique is also called pique assiette. In French this means "one who eats from others' plates". I really love this phrase and this concept. Art is nothing else as reusing elements from nature or other's creativity to create beauty, to communicate messages or to express ideas. And I find that artists like Gaudi have found the perfect balance between the natural and the artificial, the traditional and the modern, the old and the new, the local and the international. This is why their art has so much to teach us.
I have chosen Messi as the main figure for my studies with Trencadis. I believe that sports, especially at the level of Messi is probably another art form. Athletes like Messi are also performers, actors, dancers. And their actions are not limited to football only. They go beyond sports to politics, social issues, arts...
Why Messi, an Argentinian as a symbol for Barcelona? Because this guy is a proud Argentinian but at the same time he is also a son of Barcelona. His life is so much attached to the city and its team. I also believe that frontiers and barriers seems totally clueless when it comes to geniuses like him. They belong to the places they love and chosen to live and create. So Messi is Argentinian, Spanish, Italian (his family immigrated to Argentina from Ancona) and many more. He makes people happy and passionate all around the world. Exactly as the art of Gaudi or the art of all of us.
So here are the 8 first mosaics I created as a tribute to Lio Messi, the city and FC Barcelona. The funny thing is that I am a Real Madrid and a Cristiano Ronaldo fan. But I also believe that if you love sports and art you can't help it to admire what Lio Messi and his team mates have achieved the last 10 years.
