me Davide Crescini
Intervenire sulla materia e con la materia alla ricerca di realtà.
biografy
Davide Crescini was born in October 1966 in Venice, by Norwegian mother and Venetian father. He qualified at Istituto Statale d'Arte, in the course "Art of Metals and Jewellery". After his diploma he attended a specialization course at the "Scuola Arte e Mestieri" in Vicenza, improving his theoretical and practical knowledge.
In 1990 he started his activity as artisan-goldsmith opening his own laboratory where he could put into practice his skills and experience acquired also after an important job experience in a well-known goldsmith's laboratory in Vicenza. In 2002/03 he worked as a teacher of "Precious Metals Modelling" in the last mentioned school .
In these years he has devoted himself with great passion to art, with special attention on drawing and painting, modifying and integrating techniques and methods until he has reached, through the use of sand and oil-colours, his own stylistic intention.
He has displayed his works in personal exhibitions at: gallery La Cella, in June 2004; gallery Don Sturzo, in February/March 2005; gallery El Setze in Martorell (Barcelona, Spain) in July/August 2006.
Stimulated by new and continuous personal needs, he continues with his pictorial-artistic search in his laboratory-gallery in Mestre where his works are on permanent show in Via Olivi 55 – 30171 Mestre-Venezia tel. 041/976634
comments
by Giulio Gasparotti...
The mixed techniques that Davide Crescini presents memorize an alternative Venice, in an environment that is temporal, transformed in the enigma of ancient treasures, of silences born by visual cuttings moving inside every architectonic sequence.
We see neither two conflicting realities or the city's decline. The dimensional dilation is nearly an oneiric articulation of the scenography qualities made of palaces, roofs, facades, of fantastic opening, ironic if you like, but of perfect receptivity of new shapes and new imaginaries which are apt to show the fragmented and reduced spaces in the vacuum and in the full space. These are stylized to be focused on and related in a linear way, in a typology of structural asymmetries, considered as place where the exigency of expressive realization stands. It is a clock marking the scanning and the chromatic counterpoints in a sort of imagined view, pushed to seize the peculiarity beyond the common appearances.
Perspective does not impoverish the subject nor reduce it but on the contrary the subject is moved around in more directions, linking the reality elements to a fairy-tale and trying an inventive digression to modify the environmental details, rationalizing the analogies. The traditional city remains, even if in a kind of optical flight.
The show of the urban meeting in Venice persists adding to it the material provocation of pigments suitable for the rules of harmony.
Crescini, I think, wants to give a feeling of surprise "sur le motif", with a linguistic flexibility, which may guarantee its rythm and continuity, and including the organic vitality of the architectonic concept.
Prof. Giulio Gasparotti
Davide Crescini: Venice and The Solitude Of The Minotaur by Ivàn Sànchez
Venice is a strange city. Unreal, like dreams. In Venice neither space or time count; it lives so isolated by the uglyness of the world to be able to cross the limits of the compass. Venice consists of a particular perspective where the landmarks are in a whimsical disarray. When people imagined the Minotaur's labyrinth, they thought of a uninhabited Venice.
In Venice there are several "Venices" at the same time. The history of the city is an endless crossing of cultures and faces, that is why the daily Venice does not resemble at all the Venice by night. When it gets dark and in the calli there are no more tourists or romantic rude people, the traveller discovers himself in the echo of his own steps on the paving stones of Venice. The shadows created, in the same way of ours own, cast the memory of a desperate Perseus or of a monster condemned to the everlasting solitude.
Venice is a city of illusions and dreams of candies and toys. Especially, of toys. The construction with modules of a giant construction game of different colours among furrows of water allows the moon to shine in every calle. So in the night an identical Venice appears, as if by magic, below the surface of a mirror.
Davide Crescini collects, as the strangest butterflies, all the hidden Venices. All are alike but each of them is different. His work, like life, is filled with obsessions: canals, facades, doors and stairs repeat themselves one more time from different points of view. Even if he paints once again the same corner, this will change again.
Davide sees in each Venice a coloured and oneiric Venice, a Venice made of thoughtless movements, a Venice that is never dark or dirty. In his landscapes of calli we may see appear anthropomorphic faces spying us cynically, smiling with ironic mockery, menacing to give a bite to our soul before drowning the body on the bottom of the canal. Wandering in Venice, also when it is deserted without remedy, strikes us irreparably.
Although Davide entitles his works, between 2000 and 2006 "Dead City", Venice is anyhow a very lively city. In his paintings he has been able to seize the hidden personality in each corner of the urban architecture of Venice, the complexity of a tortous bank, the sneer of the windows of a stone wall, the sadness of a handrail without allurement, the waltz of a silent brick wall, the indecent passion of the grating arabesques, the betrayed innocence in an eye's reflection of a bridge in the water...
In the XX century Francesc Pujols asserted that Gaudì could offer a flexible organic unity to architecture. In the XXI century professor Giulio Gasparotti said the same about Davide's work. His style ows a lot to the techniques of classic illustration, of engraving and also of comics (Davide reminds us Vittorio Giardino's backgrounds, for the colours, and Pasqual Ferry for his shapes).
Craftsman and goldsmith, master of moulded foil, painter of the "urbe ignota", Davide works with oil colours and sand that he scrapes with the finest sensuality, with the delicacy used to chisel the frailty of a dream, of the caramel-coloured sunset of a toy city, of the infinite echo of steps in the silence and of the Minotaur's eternal solitude.
Ivàn Sànchez