The Arts Uptown
Venetian glass artist Mauro Bonaventura communicates with glass souls as he does with a friend, sharing his own emotions and the sensations that come to him. When Mauro touches the glass an instinctive relationship develops. He tells stories from the present and the past that narrate the beauty and charm of his hometown, Venice, and the element that is its heart—the sea.
The stunning sphere, named “Running through My Mind” is the deep blue color of the Venetian Sea. The artist created the sculpture from a tangle of colored glass threads that recall ocean waves, electrical circuits, or the network of nerve cells.
This colored cage contains a human figure, flexible and harmonious in its attempt to free itself from the web of threads. Mauro draws our attention to the interconnectedness of the world of the ocean, the human world outside our bodies, and the world inside our brains. There are mysterious and powerful synapses in our minds, the relationships between human beings, and the electrical signals inside the ocean that connects all of its dwellers.
It almost seems that Bonaventura’s works release an opposing tension that on one hand clutches and enfolds his figures in the multicolored sphere that imprison them.
Yet, from above opens the door to another world of a distant freedom, perhaps the most important, the boundless universe of the spirit and of ideas. While the human body can be trapped, the human spirit can never be conquered.
Mauro was born in Venice in 1965. At 18, he graduated with a diploma in electronics. In his search for a job, fate gave him an opportunity to become an apprentice in the age-old tradition of Venetian glassblowing.
Right from the start, Mauro became enamored and mesmerized with the incandescent quality of glass. His career began with learning the techniques of glassblowing and glass decoration and to date he remains in the glassmaker’s trade.
It was a turning point for Mauro in 1992 when he was fortunate to be invited by a glass maestro to observe him in lampworking. A new passion struck Mauro when he realized this technique enabled him to explore a new and exciting way of working with glass on a closer and more intimate level.
In the subsequent course of his lampworking career, we have seen Mauro Bonaventura’s artistic development growing from strength to strength with his life-like figures often encased in intricate network of cages or spheres. He continues to hone his skills and perfect his mastery of the medium of glass to create outstanding and thought-provoking art pieces.
Lampwork is a technique of glass processing carried out by a torch in which oxygen and methane gas, even propane, is used in order to create a scorching flame. The artist then uses this torch to melt the glass rods. Different colors and finishes of the rods have different densities and mineral compositions. They require different temperatures to melt. The artist must be not only artistically creative, but also educated in chemistry to properly work with the difficult and fragile materials. Once the sculpture is completed, it must be placed in a temperature-controlled kiln to further strengthen the glass.
Each creation born is one-of-a-kind, capturing the artist’s unique vision of the world. To see these and other works by Mauro Bonaventura, visit East West Fine Art at Mercato:
9115 Strada Place #5155, Naples FL 34108.
info@eastwestfineart.com :: www.eastwestfineart.com
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