Perhaps the difference between a craftsman and an artist is only in the tension towards research. It is not in the technical expertise, this is known, even if it is always a necessary premise, a fundamental baggage to always carry with you.  

The craftsman brings an extraordinary talent into play in his work, which becomes its depth and character, and which therefore could be repeated continuously throughout one's life, doubling its formal effects indefinitely. The artist, on the other hand, while employing the same technical perfection, is always striving towards the search for something new, towards  the unknown, always aimed at illuminating unexplored territories with its own existence. Perpetually in search of something, of a clearer definition of a path, of the details that reveal the surrounding environment, in a continuous search for one's own inner truth, while knowing, in the end, of how much this, in an absolute sense, is unattainable.

The world of ceramics has always included both one and the other, often overlapping their figures, sometimes generating internal debates between antithetical positions and real identity crises.  

Patrizio Bartoloni and Gabriele Resmini are two artists. Both at ease in the artisan dimension of the profession, both profound connoisseurs of the technique, both involved in productive realities active in their respective territories, Montelupo Fiorentino and Albisola Superiore, not surprisingly two of the most lively and important cities of Italian ceramics. Although starting from an artisan attendance of ceramics, while confronting daily with a laboratory reality also aimed at production, despite the awareness of their roots, they carry forward with enthusiasm and tenacity a journey in the territory of sculpture and installation, well aware that the final ceramic object is only part of the value of the experimental experience.  

Both engaged daily in real factories, one together with his brother Stefano (and his own families), the other with Luca Pellegrino, with whom they also share many experimental projects, intensely interpret a sense of belonging to the expression of their own time, in a different way: If Gabriele Resmini's work is projected to deeply investigate the ceramic relationship with geometry, often declining almost abstractly object archetypes very far from the classic habit of traditional ceramics, Patrizio Bartoloni's research is instinctively aimed at visual poetry, a lyricism full of relations with its own territory, continuous bridges launched towards the revised tradition through its own expressive lenses.  

Two different paths, even geographically distant, which met at the end of 2019 thanks to the great project, curated by AICC, which was supposed to bring more than fifty Italian artists to Fuping, one of the most important centers of Chinese ceramic history, between 2018 and 2021 and to date suspended due to the well-known health emergency.  

Bartoloni and Resmini, therefore, met between the ovens and work tables of the Chinese atelier, the Fuping Pottery Art Village, where art objects and objects of use, traditional glazed tiles (those seen in the Forbidden City, in Beijing), large decorative vases, imposing sculptures entrusted to artists in residence from all over the world.

I was also in Fuping, but I left after a few days;  in time, however, to see the first hints of a work that put them in relationship with the artisans of the ceramic center and with the other members of the Italian group of artists. In those three weeks of hard work and almost total coexistence, the idea of this project matured, which in its being itinerant in four Italian ceramic places and in including a workshop aimed at Italian ceramists from the cities of ceramics reveals the clear desire to also be an invitation, a cultural work proposal, a hymn to shared planning among the protagonists of a network increasingly projected towards the contemporary.

In this sense, this exhibition is not only an exhibition project of contemporary ceramic art, but it can indicate a way.

A path that arises from the reflection on one's working methods, on one's identities, on one's cultural references and seeks a synthesis of them. The two artists have given life, in the project,  to traditional forms totally reinterpreted with respect and freedom, with strength and delicacy. A formal choice that triggers a dialectic that also continues in the chromatic and material choices of the upholstery and colors. In the reinterpretation of the decorations, in balance with an unstoppable desire for essentiality. A continuous and harmonious swing between rigor and chromatic explosion, between affection for tradition and contemporary passion.  

A project that opens a chapter in the history of Italian ceramics, or at least suggests a possible development. A meeting and an exchange of trajectories that have never parallel races, but which lay their tracks on a soft, ductile, fertile clayey soil.