Over the last 10 years Italian artist Maurizio Savini has been creating a series of sculptures using thousands of pieces of chewing gum. The life size sculptures include a buffalo, a grizzly bear and suited businessmen suspended in gymnastic poses. His works have been exhibited internationally and some of his pieces have sold for approximately 55 000USD. They have recently been shown at testori UK gallery, London.
Chewing-gum, as a matter of fact known in Italian also as “ American gum “, was introduced by American soldiers with the end of World war two together with jeans, nylon, stocking and boggie-woggie. Its association with a state of euphoria of change and carefree youthfulness some how carried on in the following decades. Also for those born in the sixties as Maurizio Savini and I, chewing-gum reaches in the mind ‘s meanders at a tie with childhood and adolescence, and a light pressure of a future still to be built and dreamt and the slaughterhouse of personal and collective memories of the past which is gone, no one knows where when and with whom.
The sensual act of chewing, the voluptuous warmth of rebelling saliva, the artificial and secretly aseptic fragrance which spreads from the mouth as a promise and missed kiss. The synthetic fleshliness of the pink color, the obsessive square shape of the product unwrapped and ready to be shred to pieces by the power of the tongue, all compete in crashing on the senses. Applying all this to the power and energy of the Sculpture and its history causes a short circuit having the capacity of turning the ludic into stately and vice versa. The strict minimalism of parallelepiped is subverted by the uniform coating with many bars of chewing-gum completely cover it, rendering chewable to desire, soft and provoking to forbidden touch, what was abstract and distant.
Still Boggie-Woggie
Mario Codognato - 30 aprile '99
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