Laura Caramelli

BIOGRAPHY

Laura Caramelli was born in Montelupo Fiorentino, a town on the outskirts of Florence famous for its production of artistic ceramics; this gave her the opportunity to visit pottery workshops and kilns from an early age. It was at the beginning of the Eighties that she began to tackle drawing from real life at the studio of Patrick Hamilton, concentrating on nudes especially, both with a classic approach and as an exploration of movement.

Later on, she furthered her analysis of light en plein air, and subsequently attended the atelier of Marco Lisa where she was intrigued by the use of metal putties and resumed modelling terracotta. It was at this time that she attended the school of ceramics in Montelupo Fiorentino, with a special focus on the use of the potter's wheel.

A short time later she met Roger Partridge who introduced her to sculpting in stone and marble both in atelier and at the quarries of Pietrasanta.

For several years she worked with Frances Raynolds, the artist to whom she attributes her approach to minimalism and working with wood as a primitive material.

In 1994 she held a one-man sculpture exhibition at the Ceramics Museum of Montelupo Fiorentino (FI) after which she joined the IBERNA group with whom she took part in the international art competition "Projet Uni Dufour". The work was exhibited at the Musée d'Art e d'Histoire in Geneva.

After the IBERNA group broke up she continued to participate in one-man and collective shows in Italy and Europe.

She also collaborates with Pietro Antonio Bernabei, the forerunner of European Bioart, with joint works and shows and subsequently with Primo Biagioni, a versatile sculptor in terms of expression and technique.

In 2008, for the Olympic Games she was selected, along with 17 other Italian artists, to exhibit in the Forbidden City, at the " Salon des Artistes Européens de Beijing ".

Recently she joined the"Antica Compagnia del Paiolo" in Florence and has collaborated in the illustrations of Maria Rita Montagnani's book: "Il grande ascoltatore".

Currently she divides her time between painting and sculpture; her works revealing a new stylistic dimension in which, while not abandoning her taste for substance, she has evolved towards a formal minimalism centred around the profound symbolism of man.

 

EXHIBITIONS

 

A FEW CRITICAL COMMENTS:

ALDO LONDI:

"Laura’s strong point is the insatiability of her research. I am impressed by the way she devotes her time to other studies and forms of expressions alongside the practice of her medical profession.

Sculpture, painting, or rather "writing", emerge with great clarity.

In her sculptures and her canvases the idea, the thought behind the lines and colours are there, complete. It is up to us to read them and to discover their dramatic content."

 

MAURO PRATESI:

"….Laura Caramelli…with the serene awareness of being one of the worthy très petits maîtres of our time, makes her artistic debut with this line of "transversal" talents. Although she practices the medical profession, she has never interrupted her special relationship with art. On the contrary, the virtue of her artistic research lies in the fact that she never forgets her professional life, transmitting to her artistic creations the sensations and feelings she experiences in her activity as a doctor.

Her efforts are directed at infusing her creations with the feelings and compassionate consideration for life which stem from her daily contact with the most neglected aspects of a suffering humanity".

 

GABRIELE TUROLA:

Her plastic and pictorial works attain a schematism, a simplification that underline her tabula rasa approach, her desire to start from the origins of art and of the history of humanity through ancestral forms that are part of our inner world.

Laura Caramelli often resorts to symbolic shapes… that strike our imagination letting us into the primordial mysteries that concern also modern man.

She explores the arcane aspects of art in order to find a balance between the I and the Self, between the individual soul and the universal soul.

   

MONICA SEGUI GONZALEZ: 

The key to Laura Caramelli's artistic language is to be found principally in colour and in the elaboration of matter. The style of both her paintings and her sculpture ranges from the schematised figurative to the abstract and is characterized by personal formulas that combine tradition with contemporariness.

In the landscapes represented in her triptychs the essential features develop through intensely chromatic geometric figures; rhythmic repetition dominates as do contrasts that evoke the classic tradition while, at the same time, attaining expressiveness through the contrasted play of roughness and smoothness of pictorial surfaces.

In other works, a primitivist and expressionist influence emerges in both theme and style. In these works the artist uses a great variety of structures and reliefs. This exploration of matter induces her to use various compositions both in the support materials (canvas, board, paper, the assemblage of various canvasses), and in the pictorial technique (oil, acrylics, minerals, sand, glass, rope, metallic net…).

The importance of matter is particularly visible on the screens with a dance theme. It is on these screens, stripped of the superfluous and where structure is emphasized, that colour and the transparency of the surface dominate.

In some of her works, the artist goes from the research of colour to the purity of whites; in others the contrast produced by red stains against a black background and vice-versa results in a powerful expressiveness. Particularly interesting are the chromatic effects obtained from the passage from cold to warm shades of colour.

The last series of monochromes introduces us to the contemplation of spaces where emptiness emerges and the purity, essentiality and elegance of the artist's language dominate. Colour creates the painting and its character materializes through thickness, opaqueness and luminosity. Opalescent shades vibrate on a gold, silver or copper lamina or on a uniform green, red, blue or yellow background. In this phase, characterized by a reduction of the chromatic range, the theme of dance reappears. On various panels with backgrounds of a single colour the elusive figure of the moving dancer is immobilized forever. 

The creative and investigative character of the artist emerges also in her sculpture. Her solid background in the ceramic factories of Montelupo, in the marble quarries of Pietrasanta and her experience in the workshops of various artisans, lead her to explore the expressive potential of matter, be it ceramic, wood, stone, cement, iron or synthetic materials. The formal simplification, the primitivism and purity of materials are the core of her style which, from its beginning with terracotta, ranges from the figurative to the abstraction of her latest work.