Paolo Bottarelli

Hermeticism pictures a tight intertwinement between the microcosmos, or the dimension of Man, and the macrocosmos, the World. The egg originates the cosmos. A recurring element for many artists — from Piero della Francesca to Lucio Fontana. The egg incarnates a perfection which surpasses any geometrical shape — it is superior to the circle, because unlike the circle, the oval shape appears spontaneously in nature. In this work the broken lid of the vase is inserted in the prepackaged egg created by Richard Ginori. Ginori’s vase is now therefore devoid of its functionality – it becomes an urn that contains its own shards. I destroyed the perfection inherent to the concept of infinite, relegating perfection to the world of ideas. The vase becomes a funerary urn containing part of its own body, thus dissolving the concepts of inside and outside, evolving from design object/fetish to alchemical icon. The parabola that runs along the shape’s margins has no start and no end.

The lid of the egg, now a container of itself, has been replaced by a lens — like an eye, it scrutinizes the shattered ruins of itself, these «sharp bottle shards» as Montale wrote, that remind us of the inevitable cycle of birth and death to which even the perfection of this shape is subject