Angelo Mottura – Matter Transformation to Yellow

Angelo Mottura – Matter Transformation to Yellow / Trasformazione della materia al giallo.
Painted ceramic, wood – 2000

Mottura takes the interior of the body and makes it an object of contemplation. The stomach — one of the most functional, unglamorous organs — rendered here in hand-painted ceramic with the vocabulary of Limoges porcelain: warm yellow ground, dense floral clusters, painted with the patience of decorative tradition. The collision is deliberate and precise. What digests becomes what is admired. What is hidden becomes surface.

The yellow variation shifts the emotional register of the series. Where the green carried a cool, almost clinical authority, the yellow is warmer, more domestic — closer to a kitchen shelf than a vitrine. The ornament feels less like irony and more like tenderness. Yet the anatomical form holds firm beneath it, unresolved.

The Rococo vocabulary does not beautify the form so much as expose the tension between refinement and visceral reality. Decoration has always been a strategy of displacement — and Mottura turns that strategy back on itself, applying it to the site of hunger, of absorption, of the body’s most private labor.