After the success of Arman's solo show curated by Franco and Roberta Calarota at the MIC - International Museum of Ceramics in Faenza, Galleria d'Arte Maggiore g.a.m. offer the public the opportunity to admire some of the masterpieces created by the artist for the occasion, among which the iconic Piccin Gari or Topolino stands out, a ceramic reproduction of a Fiat 500.
Armand Pierre Fernandez, known as Arman (Nice 1928), is one the most significant exponents of the Nouveau Realisme, the artistic movement born in 1960 that under the critical guidance of Pierre Restany gathered various artistic personalities who promoted an analysis of reality referring to the object production of new consumer society. Arman's poetics is based on the “language of quantity”: the leitmotiv of his works is accumulation, a creative process that is born by assembling several specimens of the same object, capable of evoking the new aesthetic panoramas of the newborn consumer civilization. According to Arman, “accumulation only exists from the moment in which it is visually impossible to identify the number of assembled objects. Only thanks to this number it is possible to create a wave that flows from the shape of the objects, in a sinuous way. Sometimes by chance, the identity of an object can reveal itself and sometimes not. You can also create rhythms, structures, words." (Arman, L'adventure de l'arte moderne, interview by Andrè Parinaud, in “Lettres Arts”, Paris, 1978).
Thanks to a close friendship between Arman and Franco Calarota, Galleria d'Arte Maggiore g.a.m. exhibits a series of ceramic works created by the artist for exhibition developed in collaboration with the International Museum of Ceramics in Faenza. Among these, several Arman's works stand out: the Homage to the mother, an assemblage of ancient sewing machines loaded with symbolisms linked to the artist's memory, Le Bielles coulées, in which the principle of accumulation is projected onto a series of automobile engines reproduced in ceramic, Piccin gari or Topolino, an assemblage that presents itself to the viewer as a monumental sculpture created to investigate the mythology of seriality and the trivialization of taste. Finally, the musical instruments are emblematic and recurring elements in Arman's art and in the exhibition it is possible to admire the Violin. Arman's shattered and reassembled violins are configured as a critique of an increasingly consumerist world: as the artist says, "we no longer repair, we destroy, we throw away, we reduce to pulp." (Arman, L'adventure de l'arte moderne, interview by Andrè Parinaud, in “Lettres Arts”, Paris, 1978).
