In a family business, there is always the chance that younger generations won’t want to follow in their elders’ footsteps.
Davide Salvadore, whose family has blown glass on the Venetian island of Murano for almost four centuries, considered the idea a possibility with his sons, Mattia and Marco. He even encouraged them to explore other professions.
Recently in Columbus for the opening of Mattia and Marco’s debut exhibition at Sherrie Gallerie, the elder Salvadore explained through his translator, central Ohio glass artist Domenico Cavallaro, that he tried to show his sons the ugly side of the job: the blazing heat and hours of physical labor required to create something beautiful.
“But it’s in their blood,” Cavallaro said.
Working with their father in the same studio, the brothers — in their early 30s — are constantly exposed to traditional techniques and enthusiastically use them in their collaborative pieces.
To those skills, however, Mattia and Marco add an element of bold, youthful improvisation. The resulting works are at once classically exquisite and uniquely experimental.
The show consists almost entirely of the “Opera” series, in which numerous aesthetic variations are explored within a single elegant shape. One brother concentrates on form, while the other applies crushed colored glass and murrine — or multilayered, circular glass cane, free-form-style — to the molten base.
The series could have just as easily been called “Space Opera.”Its unorthodox color combinations and surface textures have an ultramodern feel. In the recurring shape, one can see a strong resemblance to an oversize seedpod — the type of pod from which aliens emerge in the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Among the most translucent works, Opera #5 clearly displays the full depths of its composition — the layers of complementary yellow and purple tints with bursts of bright red — and a carving technique that gives sections of the work a surface similar to that of the human brain.
Tall, dark and handsome, Opera #10 incorporates a rarity in the medium — purely opaque black glass — as well as fine cane applied with brushlike delicacy and carving patterns that expand on the geometrically precise lines etched into fine crystal.
Sherrie Gallerie also presents a selection of works from the Salvadore family’s signature series, “Spirale,” in which proprietary colors and techniques conjure up the illusion of carved wood.
Several intricate, exacting works by the elder Salvadore are on view to illustrate the dramatic difference that one generation can make.
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