Angelo Mottura – Matter Transformation to Green

Angelo Mottura – Matter Transformation to Green / Trasformazione della materia al verde.
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: emerald ground, gold scrollwork, medallioned roses. The collision is deliberate and precise. What digests becomes what is admired. What is hidden becomes surface.

The Rococo ornament 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.

The works ask what we choose to ornament, and what that choice conceals.