07 September 2004

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The Ermanno Casoli art prize

In Serra San Quirico today: the closing ceremony and announcement of the winners

This afternoon in Serra San Quirico the closing ceremony took place of the Ermanno Casoli International Art prize, the contemporary art exhibition and award dedicated by the Casoli family to the founder of the Fabriano company Elica and organised in co-operation with Serra San Quirico’s district council. This year’s edition, the seventh, had 17 artists participating, both from Italy and abroad, who were asked to give expression to the theme of “Communità/Community”, examining the concept of the evolution of community and the formation of new collectives and the changes taking place around this significant archetype.

The winners are:

1st prize: Marco Lodola, from Pavia, for the work in Perspex and enamel “All fall down” (2004)

Reasons: “Marco Lodola has the ability to communicate his thoughts about art directly to the public. His community of people is happy, vivacious, participative, ideal characters in an artistic world that’s colourful and spontaneous. The prize-winning work involves people in one of childhood’s most common and popular games, with ring-a-ring-of-roses seen as a fundamental moment in terms of socialising and enjoyment: through the game, children discover life and prepare themselves for adulthood.”

2nd prize: Gian Marco Montesano, from Bologna, for his work “The dance of the victors” (oil on canvas, 2004)

Reasons: “ Russian female soldiers and American male soldiers dance together at the end of the Second World War in a victory dance both liberating and reconciling, as if it were a game that might help them forget the destructive and tragic consequences of the war’s still-present horrors. The grisaille oil painting seems to gesture towards photography, but endows with importance and solemnity a moment in which the History of great events seems to move to the side and make a space for people and their need for happiness.”

3rd prize: Pier Paolo Koss, from Genoa, for “One millions Parade IY”, (mixed media photo, 2003)

Reasons: “The video made by Pier Paolo Koss in North Korea reveals an example of collective involvement which hasn’t been seen in the West since the period of totalitarianism between the wars. The mass participation of people at political demonstrations creates an extraordinary choreography, giving the idea of a single body formed by millions of people in synchronised and unified movement. The force of these images is emphasised by the acid colours added to the still frames, so that they seem to belong to a memory pertaining to the last century rather than the real, living present.”

Special prize by the jury: Yumi Karasumara, from Japan.

Reasons: “The Japanese artist, who divides his time between Bologna and Kyoto, expresses contemporary imagery through painting that is extremely slow and highly controlled. He is able to select particular moments from the contemporary events around him, or from the history of his own country, which thus become transformed into significant icons. The paintings are a synthesis of drawing and painting: colours fill the spaces in an infinite of graphite networks, amplifying the emptiness. Karasumara’s work has a strong social sense and is an important example of how contemporary art can be produced through a renewal of traditional language.”

Inaugurated last 3rd July in the Regional Historic Map Centre in the Santa Lucia Monastery, the exhibition has been visited by a vast public, and has become a moment of important growth and development for the territory. Francesco Casoli, creator of the initiative together with his mother Gianna Pieralisi, emphasised this fact: “ A community grows and develops towards the future with the evolution of its collective conscience and knowledge. To enter into the hearts of people, the emotion that they feel in front of a painting or other form of art can truly make a difference.”

Serra San Quirico’s Mayor, Gianni Fiorentini, underlined the necessity of capitalising on the past few years’ work and pointed out the interest in the exhibition taken by the Ancona Province Museum Society and the Marche Media Library, represented at the prize-giving ceremony by the president Stefano Schiavoni. The aim is to insert the Prize Casoli into a circuit that enhances cultural proposals.

The winning works of the Ermanno International Casoli Art Prize will become part of a Serra San Quirico museum, to be established in the future: a museum that will give a sense of stability to the initiative, called a “national classic” by its curator Valerio Dehò.

The award also strengthened its links with the Serra San Quirico district this year through a photography workshop run by Paolo Bernabini and a Raku ceramics workshop run by Marcello Pucci and Orazio Bindelli. Over thirty people took part in these workshops, mixing students from art schools all over Marche with ordinary enthusiasts. The participants were able to live for some days in close contact with the Serra community, creating a valid contribution to the spread of values which culture encompasses through sharing a significant moment of knowledge and correlation of the territory’s historical memory.