Verso Earendel

“Coralla Maiuri Style”

A fiery energy, an intellectual voracity, and an irrepressible compositional frenzy—translated into a vast and multifaceted body of work—fuel Coralla Maiuri’s artistic journey; always, relentlessly, every single day. Hers is a kind of creative insatiability that compels her to accumulate ideas, devour visual stimuli, images, and thoughts, and then give them tangible visual and material form, unfolding them through a process marked by an uncontrollable phase of mental absorption followed by exuberant, intense production; always accompanied by a profound sense of joy, enthusiasm, curiosity, and healthy irony.

Within this whirlwind of activity and imagination, porcelain occupies a place of particular significance, constituting a sort of central nucleus around which, like satellites, the other expressive forms belonging to her repertoire cyclically revolve. Her unstoppable need to engulf and deconstruct forms and colors; to accumulate dreams and fantasies, granting them compositional and semantic legitimacy; to consume the imagination only to transform it into graphic, plastic, and painterly visions; to indulge her own extreme gesturality and then pour it into matter, giving rise to a pure, visceral, and uncontrolled action—finds its culmination in clay that is shaped, glazed, and fired.

Whether these are objects destined for practical use or, conversely, creations that detach themselves from the real world, devoid of any purpose other than making room for the most unbridled imagination, Coralla has long since achieved, through porcelain, a language entirely her own: definitive and unmistakable.

It assumes the character of a true lexicon—wholly original and autonomous, yet dense with both distant and proximate echoes, chronologically and historically speaking—assimilated and reactivated according to a personal code that renders them unique, renewing and reinterpreting them. A lexicon composed of marks, proportions, passages, inventions, memories, unexpected events, flashes, ruptures, recoveries, improvisations, assemblages, accelerations, unmistakable reflections attributable exclusively to her name, defining a “Coralla Maiuri style” that finds its most complete and iconic expression in her porcelain works.

–Pier Paolo Pancotto

Ceramic sculptures as ambiguous machines, surreal stratifications of meaning and matter, cathartic liquefaction and lustre reflections. Metallic languors, prosaic relics and leftovers rendered unrecognisable, dazzling as a prophecy. A break-in of meaning: Hieronymus Bosch meets Jean Tinguely.

Forms subside and colours explode; mossy patinas, mica lichens and psychedelic glitter accumulate and blur together. Codes and algorithms, glazes and superimposed iridescences speak to one another in a chant that is at once hieratic and pop.

Coralla balances her certainties on the head of a pin, making monumental, like a ziggurat pointed toward the sky, a plastic vocation whose dimension is intimate and self-contained. The game fades into something sibylline and elusive; these are tarot arcana that provide no answers, laden with questions, alchemical evocations and suggestions. Lavish in irony, in futurity and in unease.

The boundary becomes as fluid as water, shifting and expanding beyond measure, open to every hermeneutic, narrative and imaginary possibility one might wish to discover within it. She has invented a ceramic material capable of extreme metamorphoses in order to bring to life a landscape of spaceship-towers and pale mountains of volcanic manna containing the suspicion of Borrominian architectural vortices.

A panettone-shaped summit of Nordic clarity is strewn with brilliant moulds and spores, beaded with laminated droplets of many colours that furrow its astral nature. Here is the cocoon of fabulous insects or creatures in mutation, such as the brown beetle, beside a porcelain concretion whose delicate carapace-like reliefs are threaded with the profiles of hollowed bones.

Coralla has generated dreamlike chrysalides, tiny islands covered in rust and mother-of-pearl. She has finally given body to those triumphant and mocking panoplies that floated, amniotic, within her vision.

An intellectual mollusc, probably a musician, has settled into a translucent faïence dwelling crowned with ivory curls, strange sketches of ferns, or perhaps notes from a score never performed. A rocket—or perhaps it is only a cuttlefish—reveals a red belly reflected in mirrors. Perched atop a capital of vaporous raw clay is a star-spider fashioned from kiln elements wound into glittering springs.

Coralla Maiuri has brought much of this over-world into being through crystalline glaze which, with the addition of reactive earths, released a gas that caused it to swell and erupt into foam. A thousand honeycomb perforations, the substance of a sponge or of a fluid, frayed fabric suspended in the wind. Sugar meringue, shaving foam or wound-sealing polyurethane, yet equally capable of lashing and stinging.

The direction remains in her hands, guided without fear toward what Pavel Florensky called “reverse” or “inverted perspective”. Premeditated and urgent plastic inventions that incarnate themselves as “defective” icons, polycentric heresies composed of apparently accidental and incompatible elements. Syntheses of everything and nothing that certainly resemble nothing we already know.

Aliens intersect dorsal and frontal planes, fragmenting the rhythm of perception, and prove far more expressive and compelling than a thousand more correct compositions, inevitably inert, stripped of all freedom and incapable of invective or dynamic provocation. The content of a space is transmitted without revealing either its organisation or its true point of access, thereby fracturing its simultaneity.

Mirrored totems that embody a cognitive rebellion even before an aesthetic or representational one, directed against the most widespread and arrogant presumption of all: that of possessing the one true and authentic “word of the world”.

–Cesare Cunaccia

Coralla Maiuri was born in Mexico City in 1957. She is the daughter of the Italian screenwriter Dino Maiuri and the Polish actress Irasema Dilian. When she was four, the family returned to Italy, and from the age of five she lived with her brother Antonio in Ceprano, immersed in the countryside of the Liri valley.

Her earliest formative experiences are profoundly tied to that rural world. Coralla and her brother were taken in by a community of farmers who, in their eyes, appeared as living archetypes—primordial figures who guarded something of the deepest roots of human existence. During long walks along the Liri river, Coralla discovered a clay with which she made her first small sculptures. Among these she recalls a cat that, she says, "received the barking of many generations of dogs."

At twelve she moved to Rome, where she attended the Liceo Classico Torquato Tasso. From childhood, the brush never left her. Alongside the practice of drawing and painting, she made more radical and poetic gestures: she flooded her parents' house with plane-tree leaves, threw silver Christmas baubles into the oak grove where the sheep grazed, and painted her aunt's gate pink to celebrate the birth of her first daughter.

Since she was a little girl, she has tried to keep "one foot here and one there." That "there" was the place of imagination and mystery: the desire to enter the Kingdom of Heaven through a gap in a dry-stone wall or the hollow of a tree, to be adopted by God and the Madonna, in response to a solitude she felt very keenly.

Among the most significant exhibitions of her career, she remembers Da Fonte a Fonte (2000), at the Casa delle Letterature and the Chiostro del Borromini, accompanied by a text by Erri De Luca; Il fucile è nell'aria (2005), at Assab One; La-Re (2005–2006), at Galleria Paolo Bonzano; Muori, Vai, Latte, at Valentina Bonomo, with a piece written by Fabio Mauri; the exhibitions at Palazzo Taverna; the Stampare ad Arte project with Giorgio Upiglio; and the exhibition at the Museo Cantonale d'Arte.