MADDALENA ROCCO

 



 maddalenarocco.com

Her studies at the Art School and The Academy of Fine Arts of Brera in Milan have been crucial to implement a “painting” vision in the way of conceiving the jewels. The craft training takes place in a small shop around the 80s. The burin technique, learned from Rino Zanuttig, becomes the pillar of the way of reinterpreting the jewel, which is engraved with a personal and contemporary style. Through this ancient technique, slow and meditative, Maddalena reveals numerous
emblems. They represent the thoughts, brought into being by her past, and which migrate into grooves on the surface of the metal mirror. They are signs which are pending, dreamed. The theme is related to the Myth, but the Myth is only an pretext to conduct to an inner and deeper dialogue. Every shape and each material is carefully thought and chosen, nothing is left to chance. The intent is to give the jewel the thickness that it deserves, filling it with profound meanings.
An iconographic study is the origin of her etchings, often also achieved by photography. She employs unusual compositional cuts, compressed spaces or lateral perspectives. Before each piece of jewellery, dedicated to a Myth, is engraved, a narrative design appears to indicate and introduce a thought. When the time comes for the realization of the jewel itself, the symbolic image of the Myth is chosen and the emblems and the forms are carefully studied. The procedure is to create small sculptures of metal and of grinded stone which are juxtaposed in apparent randomness. In fact, the unstable equilibrium and the asymmetry are of preference:
anything that causes an apparent motion and a movement of falling.
On the mirroring surfaces appears then the typical chisel of the burin, made of soft signs and light and dreamed as if they were small enigmatic "frames". The passion for jewellery animates the soul of Maddalena in an endless quest towards expressiveness which makes the discipline itself a language that ferries elsewhere.