Davide Monaldi works mainly with ceramic, a typical material of italian artisan tradition that imply long processing period of time. His sculptures and installations grows from the need to tell a story about his own life through the objects that surrounds him. As a result colourful and playful realistic sculptures of hula-hoops, a whole bunch of colored rubber bands, walls covered with fake wallpapers, alternated to a proliferation of weird figurines (that at a closer look reveals themselves as portraits of the artist himself), provides, with a melancholyc self-irony, a representation of his own world. The choice for a young artist to focus all of his production to an almost claustrophobic specific area actually expresses the desire to mantain an intimate relationship with it’s own idea of making art. Just the fact that in the italian artworld this material, past the afterwar years (during which was largely used by great artists such as Leocillo, Lucio Fontana, Wilfredo Lam) was basically forgotten, makes Monaldi’s work suspended between artisanal craftmanship and conceptual research, surprisingly anachronistic and capable to shows in the process making the alienating condition of being an emerging artist in this country.
Ilaria Bonacossa