Artistic Collaborations
ARTISTIC
COLLABORATIONS
Giannoni & Santoni at the service of art. Bringing artists’ intuitions to life by providing the materials and tools they need to bring their ideas to life.
Big ideas need great teams to achieve extraordinary results.
Artistic collaborations are born from this awareness: the artist’s idea ie developed and takes shape through a series of phases in which technology merges with creativity and dexterity is combined with industrial technique.
Many artists over time have turned and continue to turn to Giannoni & Santoni to realize what their intuition suggests, contemporary eclectic works, a mirror of the fluidity of our times.
Oliviero Toscani
From renowned Benetton commercials to the human race, Toscani’s photographs are always able to move.
Toscani’s photography, which is strong, contentious, and scandalous, places the viewer in front of his particular responsibilities with no way out, stimulating him to examine his current condition.
“There is just true art or – on the contrary – its absence,” Toscani explains. True art fills the gap between us and perfection, assisting us in comprehending and closing this gap. Plants, oaks, and leaves don’t require art because they are already perfect.
Giovanni Ozzola
Photographic, video, and sculptural installation are among the techniques used by this multidisciplinary artist. He was born in Florence and now lives in the Canary Islands, where he shows his art across the world. Ozzola is fascinated by the phenomen of light and its various physical characteristics. His major interests include conceiving and expressing the infinite, as well as geographical and introspective investigation.
Aurelio Amendola
Also known as the photographer of artists, Aurelio Amendola approached photography from a very young age and as self-taught. His natural light shots are immediately noticed by the sculptor Marino Marini who commissions him the first work as a professional. From there there will be many artists who choose Amendola to immortalize their work: De Chirico, Lichtenstein, Pomodoro, Schifano, Warhol, to name just a few. Not only contemporary artists, Amendola is above all famous for having immortalized and reinterpreted the great Renaissance masterpieces, first of all Michelangelo.
Enzo Fiore
Enzo Fiore was born in Milan on July 13, 1968. After attending the artistic high school in Milan, he graduated in painting in 1991 from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, under the guidance of maestro Luciano Fabro. For some years he dedicated himself to the restoration of antique paintings and the realization of scenographic installations. In 2006 he met the gallery owner Stefano Contini and began a cooperation with the Contini art galleries in Venice and Cortina d’Ampezzo.
Ever since his debut as an artist in 1997, Fiore has always drawn directly from nature to create his portraits, using a unique technique based on the use of moss, leaves, roots, earth, stones, resin and concrete, combining together shapes and forms that are suspended between reality and fantasy.
Since 2008, the artist has introduced the use of various insects into his artistic creations.
His works are exhibited in numerous public and private collections.
Enzo Fiore currently lives and works near Milan.
Gianni Lucchesi
Painter and sculptor, Gianni Lucchesi was born in Pisa in 1965. Since 1985 he has exhibited in personal and collective exhibitions both in Italy and abroad. In 2006 he received the Cisdac Prize for Contemporary Art. He participated in the Casablanca Biennale of 2014 and from 2016 to 2019 in four editions of the Museo della Follia curated by Vittorio Sgarbi. Since 2019 he has been exhibiting in exhibitions curated and presented by Nicolas Ballario and Carlo Alberto Arzelà. In 2021 he won the competition for the construction of the monument to Sandro Pertini in Savona.
The last exhibition made in 2023 is “Signum”, an installation curated by Nicolas Martino and exhibited in the Church of Santa Maria della Spina in Pisa.
Lucchesi’s work has always been animated by the attempt to visually translate the reflections arising from the investigation of the psyche, of the emotional states of the individual in relation to himself, others and what surrounds him. Through visual metaphors, drawn from universal languages that arise from an artistic and spiritual research, emotions take shape and color.
Ugo Nespolo
In the 1960s, he made his debut in the Italian art scene, offering a rare form of contamination between Pop Art, conceptual art, and impoverished art.
His ironic and transgressive work conveys an apparent sense of humour as well as a constant intolerance for the obligations of creative conformity, leading the artist to experiment with multifaceted research: culture and irony are the concepts behind each work, as well as the materials used to realize them, ranging from wood to metals, ceramics to glass.
COLLABORATIONS WITH G&S
“Nespolo-Laboratory without Secrets” -2013, Pontedera, Piaggio Museum
A cultural and educational approach that successfully integrates art, teaching, and urban regeneration.
The show, directed by architect Bartalini, features works by the Turin artist and pupils from Pontedera’s XXV Aprile high school, the outcome of a didactic workshop in which the students worked alongside the teacher. In addition to collaborating on the exhibition’s implementation, Giannoni & Santoni donated some pieces developed in the company’s artistic experimental laboratory.
Ecopyramide for Flowering Acacia by UGO NESPOLO
Art interacts with its surroundings, which becomes an important part of the piece. Because, unlike in white rooms of a museum, the fulfilment of the work of art takes on a dynamic dimension in this case, the visitor – who is located via traffic on board the car – is engaged in the art installation. This installation was created in collaboration with Giannoni and Santoni.
Mino Trafeli
Mino Trafeli personifies the contemporary artist’s complicated persona. In 1964, he made a splash with some sculptures at the Venice Biennale: His journey has been marked by constant meditation on the work of art, which has driven him to explore every type of artistic expression and every method of achieving it. None of his works can be defined as complete: some were never completed (their gestation continues throughout time), others are completed but require revisions and ‘updates,’ and still, others conceived for a brief existence, are destroyed.
PARTNERSHIPS WITH G&S
Trafeli 2003. Factory Terra Terra-Pontedera
The Piaggio Foundation, in partnership with the municipalities of Lajatico, Ponsacco, Pontedera, and Giannoni & Santoni, staged an exhibition coordinated by Enrico Crispolti. A unique exhibition event in Italy: an ideal journey traced across the territories of the municipalities of Pontedera, Lajatico, and Ponsacco, distinguished by the profound interaction between land and industry. A single artist, Mino Trafeli, contaminated a 25-kilometre radius with his work, engaging a lot of people and places never seen before in any other event.
Arnaldo Pomodoro
Sculptor, playwright, and graphic designer Arnaldo Pomodoro is one of the most important modern Italian artists.
Pomodoro follows in the footsteps of postmodern sculpture, a term coined by Jean-Francois Lyotard in his essay The Postmodern Condition. The classical traits of sculpture are lost in postmodernism, and sculpture becomes more than ever a mirror of the artist’s intimacy. The pedestal, generally used as the foundation for pieces, as well as the space in which the art is displayed, are both removed.
PARTNERSHIPS WITH G&S
Teatro del Silenzio 2007
The sun shines in the Lajatico countryside, both the real one that traverses the sky and the bronze one that rises from the Teatro del Silenzio’s lake and which Arnaldo Pomodoro, the famous sculptor, made with Giannoni & Santoni’s operational support. The bronze Sun shines brightly in the surrounding area and beyond. Here, the primordial elements – the lake’s water, the rolling hills’ land, the bronze fire, and the crystalline air – have truly merged and they created a new incentive for the territory and its inhabitants.
Kurt Laurenz Metzler
His enormous sculptures, built of heavy materials such as marble, bronze, iron, and aluminium, have an unexpected lightness to them.
“Metzler’s sculpture does not forcefully cross the abstract barrier; rather, it stops at the threshold while retaining recognizable features. It touches on the ready-made, that is, the assembly of everyday reality items, while keeping its independence because it aspires to be a story, a narrative. Metzler is a storyteller of the twenty-first century.”
(Dalmazio Ambrosioni)
PARTNERSHIPS WITH G&S
The big “Star” of K.L.Metzler’s Teatro del Silenzio 2010
The “Star” – the Maestro’s enormous work in metal tubes, in which hover a mixture of materials originating from plants and animals world, human silhouettes, and images of buildings that project into space – is the Natural Theater’s undisputed protagonist. The well-known Metropolitan Nevrotics, travelling installations realized in partnership with the architect Alberto Bartalini and with the operational help of Giannoni & Santoni, that the artist has brought on trips around our country and abroad. We recall their appearances in Milan’s Piazza della Stazione in 2007 and Assisi’s Lower Basilica Square in 2009.
Nado Canuti
Inspired by the civic commitment shared by many artists of his generation, Nado Canuti has dedicated himself to sculpture since the mid-1960s, developing a peculiar language, purified from the forms of geometric aspiration, but always tense and dynamic in the search for solid joints and compositional balances declined to infinity, sometimes dramatic, sometimes harmonic. His passion for different materials – concrete, wood, bronze, marble, resin, precious metals – manifested itself in a wide-ranging investigation, which was careful to explore all dimensional scales, from the monumental of enormous public works to the more intimate size of the designer.
PARTNERSHIPS WITH G&S
OFFICINA CANUTI- “The artist and the territory” – 2006-2008, Pontedera Ponsacco Lajatico and Palaia.
Paintings, installations, sculptures, murals, and art workshops are among the pieces on display. A project that will revolutionize the face of the Valdera, directed by architect Alberto Bartalini and designed in conjunction with Giannoni & Santoni. The master’s works realized during this time, become an integral part of the urban fabric, which they enrich. Instead, art critic Dino Carlesi is in charge of the event’s scientific direction, with contributions from Gillo Dorfles and Vittorio Sgarbi.
IGOR MITORAJ
His art finds constant inspiration in the ancient classical world: Eros, Venus, Icarus, Prometheus, and Apelles are rethought and reinvented through a game between the find and the archetype. His sculptures, which are often massive, are broken, damaged, and full of gaps and “omitted” elements, prompting quick contemplation on who we have been and, more importantly, what remains of us. It’s not just a matter of nostalgia or philological work: the shards of the past, the bodies, and faces represented with well-proportioned, particularly Hellenic traits, serve as the beginning point for a discussion of subjects. Love, sexual desire, femininity, loneliness, and pain are ageless concepts.
PARTNERSHIPS WITH G&S
“Angels” exhibition, Piazza dei Miracoli, Pisa, 2014.
An event exhibition, commissioned by the Opera della Primaziale Pisana, designed and managed by the architect Alberto Bartalini for the Polish artist, on the occasion of the 950th anniversary of the cathedral’s foundation.
A massive contemporary fresco, “the flight of Ikaro,” produced by Giannoni & Santoni based on a sketch by Maesto Igor Mitoraj, is on display inside the new rooms of the Opera Primaziale del Duomo, measuring almost eight meters wide by three meters high.
Igor Mitoraj – “The Big Sleep” Teatro del Silenzio 2006, Lajatico Pisa Tuscany
The sculpture “The Great Sleep” – the theatre’s very symbol – depicts a human face and was created by Igor Mitoraj for the scenography of Manon Lescaut. It was later donated to the theatre’s foundation by the sculptor. Giannoni & Santoni provide operational support.
