"Cosmic Dance" has a clear Indian root — Shiva Nataraja, who, within a circle of fire, expresses the cardinal points, triumphs over illusion and ignorance, while reassuring and offering devotees grace and shelter.This reflection on the circularity of becoming is transposed by mosaic artist Caterina Vitellozzi into contemporary art through material, far from traditional iconography. A Roman native with a degree in Oriental Languages, Caterina embraces contamination with Hinduism without going through ritual, directly penetrating its philosophical meaning. The “Cosmic Dance” takes shape through coloured Venetian smalti and glass paste, metal, minerals, and wood enclosed in a precious setting:The Martius Private Suites Hotel, just a few meters from Palazzo Montecitorio.
Caterina Vitellozzi learned the secrets of ancient mosaic art at the school of Gruppo Mosaicisti Ravenna, before developing her own, personal aesthetic based on the direct technique — that is, the individual insertion of the back of each tessera into the cement laying surface. This method allows her to create a mosaic with varying inclinations and heights, effectively producing a polychrome bas-relief sculpture. “Every work I create is unique,” explains the artist, “as I want to encompass visions of pure primary scenes, rich in light, energy and vibrations, that animate our sensibilities and our ability to contemplate, listen and share emotions.”
Her sensitivity to material sets Caterina’s art apart from traditional mosaic. When the surface develops even minimal protrusions and transitions from smooth to rough, from opaque to shiny, the object changes with every shift in light. It transforms as the sun moves through the day, continuously creating new and different visual experiences. “I like to choose, touch, cut, and match different materials,” Caterina says, “from the warmer and more natural ones such as trees, stones, gold and fragments from Nature to the colder and harsher ones such as glass paste (Venetian smalti), marble, glass, iron and pieces of concrete".
Critic and journalist Fabio Sindici says of her: “…she is one of the few women working in mosaic. And she does it in an unusual way — revealing the material instead of hiding it within the design.” A smart observation that highlights the structural function of chromatic matter. In Caterina Vitellozzi’s art, colour does not fill a form — it defines it: it evokes and emphasizes — through its own nature — the deep meaning of her work. The “Cosmic Dance” exhibition enjoys an additional value: the setting, where Renaissance heritage and contemporary linearity coexist harmoniously in the rooms of the Martius Private Suites Hotel. The underlying logic is the same: forms endure over time, lose their original meaning and renew themselves, becoming more precious like a geological crystallization, like a pearl in the silence of a shell.
Caterina Vitellozzi draws inspiration from many different eras: fossilized ammonites that seem to transform into Baroque curls in which she develops the symbolic contrast between circle and line, a gender duality within a single aesthetic body. “Venus” and “Jupiter” thus shift from deities to concrete models of gender identity. The “Mouth of Truth” becomes red, fleshy lips capable of delivering any message — from a handwritten note to the purity of a flower. The yellow, red, and blue of modern printing techniques, introduced by engraver Le Blon in the 18th century, take on alchemical meanings, transforming into water, light, and fire — primordial elements of a grand cosmic explosion. The opus vermiculatum of classical art undergoes a process of abstraction that leads to simulate organic fibre, enveloping, uterine — and then explodes into a representation of femininity as a universal principle of protection and growth, of development safeguarded by a body that offers itself in order to bring forth a new life. Wood and stone, warmth and coldness, embody nearness and distance, the tangible earth and the infinite sky, offering the aniconic emotion of a soothing landscape.
Caterina Vitellozzi, in a “Cosmic Dance” that absorbs, blends, revitalizes and gives back, transforms into mosaic the archetypal and the unusual, the pop and the ancient, Venetian smalti and different kinds of stones, the serious and the playful, preserving the timeless charm of beauty in a purified emotion that is at once sculpture, colour and memory.
Massimiliano Reggiani
