July 2018. Spoleto. Festival of Two Worlds. Jewels as Sculptures / Sculptures as Jewels.

Giorgio Facchini, a longtime friend of the Umbrian city, crosses the imposing threshold of Palazzo Collicola Arti Visive. The grand eighteenth-century building serves as a counterpoint to the jewelry that the Marche-born artist, since the 1960s, has created with a sculptural approach and a designer's flair.

The quality of his execution, his visionary theme, and his expressive power imbue his dialogue between gold and twentieth-century art with rich meaning, along a visual path that assimilates and recodes Burri's Informel, the European Futurists and Surrealists, Fontana's Spatialism, the dynamism of Kinetic art, and the plastic tension of Russian Constructivism.

The pieces on display interact with several works from the Carandente Collection, creating virtuous connections between the sculptural approach of the jewelry and the metaphysical significance of the museum's works. The result is a project unique in its approach and investigation, conceived within an institutional context: a splendid anomaly that narrates the jewel in its original sculptural novel.

Conceiving sculpture as a journey from the micro to the macro, where size is not important but balance, spatial harmony, and complex tension. Facchini's jewels arise from a design process that resembles the modular passages of a sculptor, when the latter enlarges the drawings and derives unsettling, metaphysical visions, unconcerned with trends.

Concependo la scultura come un viaggio dal micro al macro, in cui la dimensione non è importante ma lo sono l’equilibrio, l’armonia spaziale e la tensione complessa. I gioielli di Facchini nascono da un processo progettuale che richiama i passaggi modulari dello scultore, quando questi ingrandisce i disegni e ne trae visioni perturbanti e metafisiche, incurante delle tendenze.

Compared to goldsmith art, this is an inverse process, where the design is shaped by the abstract measure of concrete volume, where geometry integrates artistic avant-gardes and spaces of disruption, where art becomes grammar and no longer quotation.

Dimensional grandeur is transformed into spiritual concentration: a centrifugal space with open perspectives, a nucleus of plastic tensions in dynamic equilibrium. The jewel retains its wearable nature, but something is added: a second life for the object, museum-like and explosive, in a joyful dialogue with the sculptural sketches of Fausto Melotti, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Pietro Consagra, and Leoncillo Leonardi.

Giorgio Facchini was born a goldsmith but grew up with the idea that jewelry can release the essence of sculpture. He has always reasoned with the artisan mentality of an interior gaze, theoretical thought, and a connection to avant-garde movements. He has never disrespected his origins; if anything, in goldsmithing, he perceived the dizzying presence of the plastic fetish, of the small form that embraces and encompasses the expansive space.

The female body remains a privileged place, the biological geography that enhances the nature of the jewel; but here the silhouette does not complete the results. The body belongs to that expansive space, to a context that makes the jewel vibrate between environments, atmospheres, and energetic connections.

From the very beginning, the chosen space was the magnificent collection of Palazzo Collicola Visual Arts. The display cases thus became another connecting map, a synthesis of new, regenerative dialogues between Facchini's jewels, those of other sculptors—with works by Arman, Pol Bury, Lucio Fontana, Roy Lichtenstein, Pablo Picasso, and Arnaldo Pomodoro—and the finest works from the collection amassed by Giovanni Carandente.

«The starting point of his style is to hark back to some primordial or symbolic form, to depart from geometry but to activate it, according to a more intimate and hidden intention. And always, it must be said, with a highly selective taste for the material, an invention, an experimentation that has little to do with our traditional goldsmithing. Hence his constant interest in sculpture, and his ability to apply the spatial theme of sculpture to jewelry, with an intensity, a clarity, and a firmness of structure that defy the meticulousness of the execution, however rich and admirable.»Vittorio Rubiu