by Enrico Maria Davoli
With the recently published Lucio Saffaro exhibition review, FD becomes bilingual, and each text will henceforth be available in both Italian and English editions. FD’s second language could only be the most popular internationally and particularly on the web. Statistics about FD’s readers and where they come from (a good number from Italy, and then from many European countries, the United States, Canada, Brazil, China, India and other parts of the world) support this choice. Innovation will also work backwards: consistent with the necessary technical time, we will also translate texts that have already come out in the past, adjusting their graphics and content.
FD identity remains the same. The project is to make available to readers texts, documents, and other materials related to the culture of decoration, ornamental repertoires, and their role in the overall development of the arts. The subject of decoration is the various ways in which the structure of an artifact (from clothing to furnishings, from domestic to urban spaces) is visually elaborated and connoted. And since technical obsolescence and aesthetic obsolescence go hand in hand, imposing periodic revisions, no artifact remains the same for too long. It follows today, among other things, that, increasingly, those who do decoration do not call themselves decorators or ornamentists but, rather, designers, graphic designers or, simply, artists. It is difficult to say whether the positive or negative notes prevail in all this. What is certain is that, even in its heyday, decoration has never openly declared itself. Rather, it has merely existed as a kind of non identified object, of 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).