OPUS TACITUM
Daniele Davitti4th – 17th october 2024
opening Friday 4th october 2024, h 6.00 pm
The exhibition OPUS TACITUM by the artist Daniele Davitti opens at the Galleria Immaginaria in Florence on Friday 4 October 2024 at 6.00 pm.
The works on show are like soft bas-reliefs of fabrics and threads that seem to depict the maps of a dream, the fairy tales of an imagination that wants to stay away from our time.
In the artist’s training there is the concrete knowledge imparted in Art Institutes, and a curriculum of experiences that led him to teach Aesthetics in a prestigious international fashion school.
For this exhibition, he worked on a fairy-tale collection of favorite figures, with animals and bizarre creatures from medieval bestiaries, exotic alphabets and sinuous japonaiseries, deco motifs, sacred symbols and ‘art brut’ faces, as well as a large Papageno astonished as the Pierrot of Watteau, and also a sort of primer with poetic quotes from Miyazaki’s film Spirited Away.
A variety uniformed by the ‘palette’ of white and ecru shades, of natural monochromes that give the works the primitive refinement, the archaic effect I fantasized about at the beginning. The pieces of fabric chosen by Davitti were woven on a loom, a long time ago, by his grandmother in Valdarno: a family legacy where he recognized a work imbued with meaning and necessity: to which, by embroidering on it, he gave a precious completeness, as if the trousseau of a legendary princess.
Davitti has a professional identity that is regularly updated on the contemporary ‘fashion system’ and the related phenomena of glamor – also on their media hypertrophy and the ferocious neocapitalist paradoxes of which they are an expression. Hence, I believe, the need to create an intimate and uncontaminated space, which for him coincided, in an era of incorporeal art and narcissistic rituals, with the re-appropriation of artisanal techniques and real materials.
Text edited by Franco Zabagli.
The event is part of the program of the XX Edition of the Contemporary Art Day promoted by AMACI – Association of Italian Contemporary Art Museums.
DANIELE DAVITTI
Daniele Davitti was born in Florence in 1986. He obtained a diploma in Fashion design at Polimoda Institute where he now teaches.
In 2008 he completed his studies in Japan at the Bunka Fashion College in the city of Osaka.
The Japanese experience brought him closer to the world of Wabi-sabi aesthetics, as well as to the ethical principles of mottainai, clearly visible and represented in most of his works.
In 2009, upon returning to Italy, he developed his artistic language with his first exhibition “Dei Valori Perduti”. In the years to come, collective and personal exhibitions followed one another in Italy and abroad, including the personal exhibition Immauculate Decay in New York in 2013.
A new chapter began in 2016 at Melbourne in Australia, where he became professor of illustration at the Whitehouse Institute of Fashion Design, and where he took an interest in nature and botany.
Returning to Italy in September 2019, he presented the exhibition Mortalia Cura a retrospective composed of canvases, designs and collage realized in Asia, Europe, Australia and America.
The exhibition would be a farewell to the world of painting, leaving space to the new fascination of the art of textiles and embroidery to which he is presently dedicated.
In 2024 Davitti is among the 50 artists chosen to exhibit their own textile art work at the Contextile biennial at Guimaraes in Portugal.
Davitti is lecturer at Polimoda Firenze of Fashion Aesthetics and has created the course “Book of Mistakes” a multi-disciplinary course of art and illustration centred on the use of the hands and analog technologies of recycled and second- hand materials.
