Fine Art Gallery

My first impression, upon seeing the works of Paola Scibilia in her Atelier, was that I was in the presence of an innovative and original idea.

The mosaic techniques used by this artist most certainly originate in antiquity, but the solutions she has devised present us with contemporary results, inventions and creativity.
Since the Eighteenth century famous artists such as Gustav Klimt in decoration, Antonio Gaudì in architecture, and Diego Rivera in sculpture, had worked with mosaic art, which has come back in vogue among contemporary artists, such as Sandro Chia, Jean Michel Folon and Igor Mitoraj, to name a few.

The glass tessera is still, in our collective imagination, typical of mosaic decoration in the most traditionally decorative meaning of the world.

Paola on the other hand is able, through a careful and methodic exploration of the formal potential of this material, to produce Mosaic Sculptures: shapes, structures of steel and gesso covered with glass tesserae, often in a single color or with varations which allow her to obtain nuances to reinforce, and capture the light in a particular point or area of the volume she has covered, for a three-dimensional effect that is in the nature of sculpture.

This sense of sculpture is typical of Paola Scibilia, it represents a passion which has accompanied her since she dedicated her life to art, searching through history and tradition for values which remain significant: a great synthesis of the sculpture of the Cyclades and Byzantine-Venetian chromaticism relayed by mosaic.

Her figures take the forms of ancient divinities, of stelae - the Priestess, of stylized Guardians, Idols and sacred Fetishes, ready to guard a threshold which has lost the meaning of time and shrouded in the mystery which still lingers in the imagination of man.

Paola Scibilia is not afraid to measure herself with Glass, a material so rich in possibilities.

Side by side with her mosaic work, she has explored the ancient technique of "battuto", creating works in blown glass in the furnaces of Murano.

These works make one stop to consider the importance of understanding an artistic technique: just like in the past, when within each atelier the artists created their own colors, so Paola Scibilia today presents a possible answer to a widespread absence of "mastery" in artists, a suggestion to relieve the waning of significance and the lack of marvel typical of the world of art, by gifting us with the seduction which derives from a sophisticated craftsmanship, worthy of its most noble qualification, an integral part of every creative and artistic skill, which knows how to work the material to the "right point", as if guided by a philosopher's stone.

Fascination, if we ere to quote J. Baudrillard, of the object which is the result of work, for Paola Scibilia, her work with Glass which reveals transparency and color, with Sculpture, which conveys a message of values: a union of beauty and marvel, esthetic and moral nourishment.