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Anyone could paint a monochrome, for example, regardless of cultural background
Seth Price*

I have been engaging with the work of the CaCO3 collective since the early days of its activity. After years, I still find myself questioning an expressive universe of making, poised between different and at times conflicting shores, whose nature I find irreducibly enigmatic.1

CaCO3 is a Ravenna-based collective formed by Giuseppe Donnaloia, Âniko Ferreira da Silva and Pavlos Mavromatidis, who for fifteen years have explored mosaic, bringing back into the present the forms and ways that mosaic took during that long and fortunate season, roughly between the 3rd century BC and the 6th century AD, which saw the development, in the lands around the Mediterranean basin, of several significant types of floor and wall covering.2

Mosaic is a complex technique, with an ancestral memory and variously declined extensions in the contemporary, strongly marked by the dialectic between surface and depth.3

The surface is the domain of the sensory and sensual evidence of mosaic. It is a visual and tactile evidence, given by the texture that the arrangement of the tesserae generates, but also proprioceptive, insofar as the spatial relationship between our moving body and a mosaic score is sensitive.4

  1. *Text extracted from the catalogue of the Monocromo exhibition, curated by D.Torcellini and L.Donelli held in 2021 at the MonoGAO21 Gallery in Ravenna (Italy)
  2. 1A. Leroi-Gourhan cit. in Lo stato dell’arte. L’esperienza estetica nell’era della tecnica, edited by M. Carboni and P. Montani, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2005, p. 38.
  3. 2E. Garroni, cit. in Lo stato dell’arte. L’esperienza estetica nell’era della tecnica, edited by M. Carboni and P. Montani, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2005, p. 76.
  4. 3Lo stato dell’arte. L’esperienza estetica nell’era della tecnica, edited by M. Carboni and P. Montani, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2005, p. 66.
  5. 4Lo stato dell’arte. L’esperienza estetica nell’era della tecnica, edited by M. Carboni and P. Montani, Roma-Bari, Laterza, 2005, p. 72.