Attilio Quintili, from tradition to “VISUAL SOCIOLOGY”

 I have to highlight at least two things in this brief introduction. First and foremost, the satisfaction of having had the opportunity to write about an artist – underestimated until now – whose worth is certainly equal to that of others in Umbria who are building a reputation for excellent quality in the revival of painted majolica from their own traditional roots, consisting in this case of the important town of Deruta.

      Quintili is an interesting subject because he structurally combines his simultaneous existence as artist and majolica-maker with special tools, dexterity and his own bottega. To place Attilio Quintili immediately in his natural habitat, that is to say in his native area, Deruta, a place that is so strongly connected with ceramics through ancient tradition, is not simply to preface a critical impact with a simple piece of personal data. Quintili has been involved in those ceramics since an early age, while his work in the art, in that material, in those techniques has always been safeguarded by very personal choices, made I would say with confidentiality, in a sort of Indian reserve of essential ceramic elements, in the stigmatization of clays with stable equilibriums. In this, Quintili has been extremely coherent, rigorous, without compromise with the dominant naturalistic taste that prevails in Deruta, and is shaping what is to follow.
 He understood the potential value of a stratified tradition of craft and art very early on. Regarding the use of forms and material, their reinvented recomposition, some influence may have come from his university studies, now the subjects of new analysis, study, and of presentation with a mental approach, overturning the naturalism still evident today in the work of the craftsmen.

In this direction there are immediate indications of “VISUAL SOCIOLOGY”, well before this phenomenon was finally, analytically connoted in recent years. But again in the meaning of “Visual Sociology”, in recounting the history of Mankind Quintili has taken on himself a complex cultural stratification which has spanned the centuries. It is, then, perhaps not so essential that Quintili can declare that he has not taken part in or consciously noticed certain movement in avant-garde contemporary art; critical reception of contemporaneousness can come about not only through exhibitions and writings, but also through the reception of unexpected images, of cognitive flashes, of vibrating, albeit unconscious, antennae.

 On the other hand, his studies at the Political Science faculty in Perugia provided him with a socio-historical framework which can also be seen in the very titles of his works, which tell of a return to the past, a reduction to the most elementary particles, in which sociology is understood as an empirical science which has as its subject the observable behaviour of groups of humans, which sees in history, that is to say in historical facts, a sort of laboratory of sociology, economics, politics and linguistics.

 Out of this come the “squared circles”, the progressions freely aligned and ordered in the vertical and horizontal axes, in the significance of intimate mathematics in which the circle is important as a factor for order and equilibrium.

             This whole situation becomes disquieting in the attempt harmoniously to recompose the chaos of things, where from such complexity only the strength of the artist achieves a sort of reunion in harmony, at least a momentary semblance of pacification, of metamorphosis, where moments of calm occur in the inevitable destiny of humanity, in which movement in space/time will only be possible in circles, or rather around itself, and in which mathematical objects are neither real entities nor, still less, something unreal. These exist potentially in perceptible things, and our reason goes beyond them through abstraction.

Deruta,  september  2006                  
                                                                               Miriam Zonaria