by Enrico Maria Davoli
With the recent publication of Lucio Saffaro’s exhibition review, FD has become bilingual, with each text available in both Italian and English. FD’s second language could only be the most popular internationally and especially on the web. Statistics on FD’s readers and where they come from (a large number from Italy, followed by many European countries, the United States, Canada, Brazil, China, India and other parts of the world) confirm this choice. Innovation will also work backwards: in accordance with the necessary technical time, we will also translate texts already published in the past, adapting their graphics and content.
The identity of FD remains unchanged. The project aims to make available to readers texts, documents and other materials relating to the culture of decoration, ornamental repertoires and their role in the overall development of the arts. Decoration is the various ways in which the structure of an artefact (from clothing to furniture, from domestic to urban spaces) is visually elaborated and connoted. And since technical obsolescence and aesthetic obsolescence go hand in hand, forcing periodic revisions, no artefact remains the same for too long. One of the consequences of this today is that those who make decorations increasingly do not call themselves decorators or ornamentalists, but rather designers, graphic designers or simply artists. It is difficult to say whether the positive or the negative notes prevail in all this. What is certain is that decoration, even in its heyday, has never openly declared itself. Rather, it has existed as a kind of unidentified object, a super-art, the connective tissue between different ways and times of making art.
Homepage; a photomontage of Piero della Francesca's "Diptych of Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza" (1465-72).