edited by Giovanna Grossato
Being a magister faber in antiquity meant doing something so well as to be able to teach it to others. The term “maestro” has the same root as mag-is and mag-num, namely great; expert and learned in a science, an art or in a craft. It is the clear translation of the Hebrew “rabi” (great) from which “rabbi”, the epithet used to address Jesus, the ultimate master, derives. In the Church of Saint Ambrogio in Milan is a gold altar made in the 9th century by a craftsman called Vuolvinius. It is a wooden box-reli- quary covered in sheets of precious metal embossed with holy stories and symbols including a highly unusual scene representing Saint Am- brogio in the act of crowning the artist, whose name is accompanied by the title “magister phaber”. Sacred and social recognition of the technical skill put to the service of the idea, of the thinking, of faith. An ability which, as a “gift” from God, for the entire course of history as far as the Middle Ages, had been an anonymous, collective way of praying, to reunite with God Himself and which suddenly became the prerogative and responsibility of a single artist.
The spiritual “savoir fare” links the activity of the ancient faber to that of a contemporary artist like Gilberto Perlotto, in which the technical skill learned in a family workshop apprenticeship and the poetics of an experience based on his own personal history are in harmony.
In fact, in the work of Perlotto, the power and the experience of a va- luable, deep-rooted artisanal habilitas coexists with the modern sen- sibility that makes use of that technique to translate the forms of con- temporary thinking into iron and, lastly, with the ability to make them a timeless narrative that belongs to the universal spirit of things and reflections on the self.
The artist’s language comprehends all of the narrative freshness borne by everyday objects and elements of nature related to an obsolete far- ming world. Books; the furnishings of a rural world on the verge of ex- tinction; Fragrant Savoy cabbages from the garden of Mother Nature; little mice and spiders that get the upper hand on man’s time; everyday clothing; ladders and old hemp ropes charged with symbolism; simple tables that hold unwitting symbols of vices and virtues. Objects which, without ever losing their main function as physical actors with identi- fiable, connoted forms, nonetheless succeed in creating a bridge to a “further” dimension.
As protagonists displayed inside the extraordinary sacristy of the ba- silica of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari («a group exhibition together with Giovanni Bellini, Donatello, Titian, Paolo Veneziano, Alvise Vi- varini…», as Gilberto Perlotto himself states with subtle self irony), the 15 works gathered together by curator Alessandro Ghiotto under the title “Elévami” represent the nouns, adjectives and verbs of a me- talanguage addressing both those who observe, in awe of the preci- sion in transposing the real into an almost eternal material like iron, and those who can perceive the “existential lightness” of such a heavy substance. A fascinating and perhaps irreconcilable paradox between the transience of life and the human need to find a perpetual source of meaning in it.