Made in Sardinia

The rebirth of Sardinian craftsmanship, during the twentieth century, is often interpreted as a return to the primitive roots of art after the decay caused over the centuries by the Pisan, Spanish and Piedmontese influence.

A chronicler of “Il Corriere dell'Isola”, speaking of current productions, defines them as “closer to the very ancient Sardinian style”, whose recovery is due to attentive artists who “have added the curved line to the geometric, polygonal line, as a necessary evolution of Sardinian design, after all, already present in certain primitive figures of animals and men, instinctively expressed in Sardinian bread, worked with worship by the housewives”.

The syncretism of forms that distinguishes many aspects of island production, with an intertwining of popular inflections, “ethnic” archaisms and cultured speech, is perceived as the result of a continuity between prehistoric art, folk art and contemporary craftsmanship. An interpretative stretch that, however, reflects the awareness of “very firm ethnic unity” - as Luciano Moretti defines it in “The Craftsmanship of Italy” - on which the current movement is based, and which explains the complete “absence of rhetoric” of the results achieved.

Mauro Manca also practices the nuragic theme, transferring the results of his “Mediterranean” phase of the first half of the 1950s and those of subsequent design research into weaving, and he designed a series of carpets tied with figurations of aggressive Nuragic warriors and archetypical symbols, in black-white and in color, for the weavers of Dorgali. Manca's' barbaric 'line is reconciled with that, promoted by Ubaldo Badas and Eugenio Tavolara, of 'renewal in tradition'. However, it is the latter that has the greatest successes.

Update

20/9/2023 - 11:39