The Enchanting Weave Of Luciano Ghersi
By J.B. Dissanayake
Luciano Ghersi has been involved in the creative art of handwoven textiles for the past 35 years, with international exhibitions and workshops in museums and galleries of contemporary art. He has experimented with creative weaving using diverse materials, mostly recycled, from gold to barbed wire, from silk to plastic bags.
He is a professor at the Foundation for the Art of Silk (Florence) in “Kente African weaving” and “Tribal rug loom”, www.fondazionelisio.org.
Ghersi has written extensively on weaving and his work has been published in international journals and periodicals on woven textiles
Ghersi has worked in weaving projects in India, Ghana, Algeria and with prison inmates in Terni (Italy).
He discovered Sri Lanka in 1992 as a country rich of culture, arts and humanity. On a later visit to Sri Lanka, Architect Designer Tilak Samarawickrema introduced him to his master weaver Sirisena from Talagune, Udu Dumbara, the oldest weaving village in the island.
He gained much experience from the unique weaving technique of Sirisena during his stay in Talagune, where he also conducted a workshop about his personal weaving techniques.
With this exhibition he wishes to pay homage to Sri Lanka, his beloved host country, where he will show six mini-tapestries woven in 1992, with inserted plastic letters of the Sinhala alphabet. The letters are hand sewn by an anonymous craftman.
The core of the exhibit consists of ten large “Abstract tapestries” handwoven with fashion rags, off-cuts of Made in Italy fashion fabrics. They are titled Abstract as they recall no specific subject, apart from the concrete flow of colours in the weft, like the sounds and voices of Italian Opera.
The exhibition will also display a photographic documentation of his work, and two films on Ghersi will also be shown: A video produced by Italian public TV Rai3, showing the artist in his workshop, located in the medieval historic centre of Porchiano Del Monte, in Umbria and a video anthology from YouTube channel “hypertextile”, produced by Ghersi.
Luciano Ghersi is a weaver whose preoccupations are those of all modern 20th Century artists: extending the subject matter of art, extending the materials you can make it from, and new applications of old skills. With a singular strength of will in his work, arrived at only by a conscious clarity and the full possession of the resources of his craft, he achieves a refined elegance in matters of taste in his creations, and, their display. It is a quality which defines purity, in painting as in weaving.
Luciano Ghersi has no mind to speculate on ‘sentiment’ or introduce ‘ideas’, until the ‘sentiment’ and the ideas’ have been skillfully and subtly organised. Some of his large-scale works are skillfully displayed in public places (the ‘Poncho’ draped on the neoclassical sculpture in a town square, and his tapestries on the city wall announcing a weaver’s workshop) both shock and inspire; they dominate and triumph in their purpose.
In many of these works, his purpose seems to me, is to present life and things human (human detritus for example) just as they are. It is a purpose and programme not without a certain ingeniousness, but their positive merit, it seems to me, is to have found, or rather, to have introduced, poetry, and sometimes the purest poetry, in things or themes, which until now have been considered base or insignificant. But in the world of art, there is no subject or material which the artist’s handiwork cannot ennoble or debase, render disgusting or delightful: nothing is too solid, or heavy, or too strong for him; or, from an artistic point of view, too explicit.
The artist is eager to wield (thorough, in Luciano’s case, woven things) an influence on society, on ordinary people and craftsmen alike. It is his anxiety to reach an aim quite other than that of mere entertainment which distinguishes Luciano Ghersi from most post-modern artists. He is an artist who has, to my mind, committed himself to a cause: that of education, in addition to avant-guardism.
The real presence of things in his work; barb-wire, human detritus from beaches, plastic, rope, bits of fish-net etc. are intellectual transpositions which the weaver’s craft has achieved in transforming into art. It is, Luciano Ghersi’s way of looking at and handling the world around him, by the individual operations of his hand and his eye, with which, he transforms his individual act of seeing into a thing seen and to be looked at by us. His works absorb, dismiss and consume our sense of surprise, replacing the modern question of how it was done, in the same way as music can sometimes so enchant us that the very existence of sounds is forgotten.
box
Exhibition Next Weekend
The exhibition will be opened on Friday, February 25th and will be open to the public on Saturday 26th and Sunday 27th at the Deshamanya Siva Obeyesekere Crafts Gallery, Lak Pahana,14 Reid Avenue Colombo 7.
