Lorenzo Riva, couturier and art collector
Marina Pizziolo and Romano Ravasio remember Lorenzo Riva, great couturier and unforgettable friend, by re-proposing the video presented at the Balenciaga Museum in May 2023. In the video, Riva tells how he became artistic director of the Maison Balenciaga.
…From Paris, Riva brought over 9,000 Balenciaga drawings to Italy. Thanks to Art Consulting, this unique collection has been acquired in 2023 by the Basque government for the Balenciaga Museum, an architectural masterpiece overlooking Getaria, the birthplace of the great Basque couturier overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.
Travel to India. A collection of Indian contemporary art
Antonio Stellatelli is an Italian collector who travelled with us to China and India. We took him to visit the studios of major artists; he was able to meet them and discover their works. The result was a new art collection. We wrote a book on this extraordinary adventure we experienced together. This video, shot in Jodhpur, New Delhi and Mumbai, describes the magic of those days.
…In India, at the Italian Cultural Institute in New Delhi, in January 2012, we presented the book we wrote about Antonio Stellatelli’s collection of contemporary Indian art. A collection that we designed and curated and that grew out of a long journey with him in India. Antonio Stellatelli is a brilliant Italian who, for over half a century, has made art his second life. His first being a teacher of statistics and then a manager at the top of private and public companies. Stellatelli has devoted much of his life to putting together major collections of art, to which books and exhibitions in international museums have been dedicated. Antonio Stellatelli has chosen to collect in order to know and to make known. His collections only remain temporarily within the walls of his home.
Lorenzo Riva, couturier and collector
Le Fonti TV discuss art investment and the role of art advisory. Economic journalist Achille Perego host. Guests: Marina Pizziolo, who founded and directs the Art Consulting network with Romano Ravasio, and Mariacristina Ragazzoni, Head of art advisory at Banca Aletti.
…The broadcast addressed key issues: art market trends, investment strategies, the development of art advisory and art in private banking portfolios. Finally, the discussion focuses on the importance of consultancy services for the art collector, who is facing a difficult market. A market where information asymmetry is the rule and the guarantees offered to the buyer are often inadequate.
Travel to India. A collection of Indian contemporary art
Antonio Stellatelli is an Italian collector who travelled with us to China and India. We took him to visit the studios of major artists; he was able to meet them and discover their works. The result was a new art collection. We wrote a book on this extraordinary adventure we experienced together. This video, shot in Jodhpur, New Delhi and Mumbai, describes the magic of those days.
…In India, at the Italian Cultural Institute in New Delhi, in January 2012, we presented the book we wrote about Antonio Stellatelli’s collection of contemporary Indian art. A collection that we designed and curated and that grew out of a long journey with him in India. Antonio Stellatelli is a brilliant Italian who, for over half a century, has made art his second life. His first being a teacher of statistics and then a manager at the top of private and public companies. Stellatelli has devoted much of his life to putting together major collections of art, to which books and exhibitions in international museums have been dedicated. Antonio Stellatelli has chosen to collect in order to know and to make known. His collections only remain temporarily within the walls of his home.
How to invest in art
Le Fonti TV discuss art investment and the role of art advisory. Economic journalist Achille Perego host. Guests: Marina Pizziolo, who founded and directs the Art Consulting network with Romano Ravasio, and Mariacristina Ragazzoni, Head of art advisory at Banca Aletti.
…The broadcast addressed key issues: art market trends, investment strategies, the development of art advisory and art in private banking portfolios. Finally, the discussion focuses on the importance of consultancy services for the art collector, who is facing a difficult market. A market where information asymmetry is the rule and the guarantees offered to the buyer are often inadequate.
Travel to India. A collection of Indian contemporary art
Antonio Stellatelli is an Italian collector who travelled with us to China and India. We took him to visit the studios of major artists; he was able to meet them and discover their works. The result was a new art collection. We wrote a book on this extraordinary adventure we experienced together. This video, shot in Jodhpur, New Delhi and Mumbai, describes the magic of those days.
…In India, at the Italian Cultural Institute in New Delhi, in January 2012, we presented the book we wrote about Antonio Stellatelli’s collection of contemporary Indian art. A collection that we designed and curated and that grew out of a long journey with him in India. Antonio Stellatelli is a brilliant Italian who, for over half a century, has made art his second life. His first being a teacher of statistics and then a manager at the top of private and public companies. Stellatelli has devoted much of his life to putting together major collections of art, to which books and exhibitions in international museums have been dedicated. Antonio Stellatelli has chosen to collect in order to know and to make known. His collections only remain temporarily within the walls of his home.
New York. A collector, a book and a performance by Andrea Bianconi
In March 2013, at a conference dedicated to the presentation of our book on art collecting held at the Italian Institute of Culture in New York, the Italian artist Andrea Bianconi gave a performance commissioned by us.
…Romance is a video performance that illustrates extracts of his stream of consciousness. The video contains a very fast sequence of images that reveal his thoughts as they appear in his mind. Words and images follow in rapid succession. There is a continuous relationship between every word, just as each image is connected to the next. Yet the meaning is mysterious, incomprehensible. His work has neither beginning nor end, but rather is a circular narration that indicates a discourse-course traversed by an endless chain of association, void, surplus, lapsus. Romance is a mixture of construction and deconstruction, of opening and closing, of intimacy and of extroversion. An endless chain of associations. Romance is a performance and an animation film alluding to the “mental cinema” of Italo Calvino. It is a search for the “traces of something that may not ever exist”. The artist is immobile in his performances. The video is projected onto his face. “Mental cinema”, Calvino writes in American Lectures, “is always at work in each one of us, and it always has been, even before the invention of the cinema. It never stops projecting images before our mind’s eye”. A flow of images, on the other hand, that well represents the journey of every collector, who needs to be able to extract from the sea of contemporary art the images that will tell his own story.
When does a photograph become a work of art?
A conference was held in Turin in October 2011 on the photography of “Il Borghese”, the historic politics and culture magazine, founded by Leo Longanesi. Speakers: Marina Pizziolo, Vittorio Feltri, Beppe Fossati, Dario Reteuna and Paolo Longanesi.
…In her speech Marina Pizziolo tackled the difference between news photography and art photography. The first tends to pass on the memory of an event, the second tends to convey a reflection on reality, on the form of reality. An engaging discourse, touching on themes such as the paradox of truth, the possibility of manipulating memory through photography, to then approach the issue of the representation of pain, of fear and the existential scream in contemporary art.
Arturo Carmassi. A film by Jean-Claude Luyat
The film was shot Arturo Carmassi’s studio in Tuscany, on the occasion of the great exhibition dedicated to the artist, which Marina Pizziolo curated in 2005, when she was director of the Bandera Foundation. One of the many exhibitions on Carmassi she curated: such as that at Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, the Italian Institute of Culture in Brussels, or Espace Cardin in Paris.
…The film, made by the French director Jean-Claude Luyat, allows you to enter the mysterious world of the great artist, who died in 2015. The huge windows of Carmassi’s studio overlook the Fucecchio valley. The soft line of the horizon is punctuated by the verticality of the bronzes and marbles on watch outside. The paintings are inside.
Carmassi hasn’t aged with time but he has become bigger. Like one of the age-old cypresses that stipple the Tuscan hills like hieratic columns supporting a sky that grows heavier yet more limpid day by day. Arturo Carmassi lived art as if it were a document essential to existence, like an indelible mark of our transitory eternity and therefore as an attempt to justify our existence. He passed through the art of the Novecento like a solitary giant. After months and even years, talking to him is always like picking up the threads of a conversation interrupted only seconds earlier by an untimely telephone call. The pieces Carmassi worked on day after day, night after night are large, sober, and raised up on easels that crowd his studio. The outpost of an army lined up to resist the advancing void. “The river of time is not dragging me to its estuary. Slowly, day after day, I am going back to the source”, says Carmassi. “I feel I am getting closer all the time. I understand it from the freshness and the clarity with which I am able to see things, the same things I have carried with me all my life”. Everything around Carmassi is gigantic. Spaces. Things. From the elephant skull that gives the table in the large hall that air of pagan altar to the silences, the voids and the absences. “Do you know what it means to believe in what you do? The solitude such awareness condemns you to?”, he asks. “Day after day, night after night I toiled over every work. I did not simply paint them, first I invented them and then I built them. Now they are ready to function, like aesthetic machines. Ready to prompt questions”.
The body and the soul. Federico Guida and Paolo Schmidlin
A freewheeling conversation between Marina Pizziolo, Federico Guida and Paolo Schmidlin, on the occasion of the exhibition The body and soul held at the Fondazione Bandera, in December 2004. The exhibition was the first appointment of a series of dialogues between young protagonists of the contemporary art scene, which inaugurated an exhibition cycle conceived by Marina Pizziolo and Romano Ravasio when they were directors of the Fondazione Bandera.
…Federico Guida and Paolo Schmidlin give shape and colour to bodies. Protagonists of a story that has its roots in the fears and concerns of women and men unable to solve the enigma of life.
The painted reflection. The art of Ettore de Conciliis
The film The painted reflection was presented for the first time in 2011 at the headquarters of the European Parliament in Brussels, with a talk by Marina Pizziolo and an exhibition by Ettore de Conciliis.
The film is directed by Carlo Laurenti and Augusto Marchetti, with music by Ugo Laurenti.