The MUSABA project, led by Nik Spatari, is inseparable from the recovery of the area’s historic monuments, among which it constitutes an exemplary instance of insertion within today’s cultural concept, which places no artificial separation between present and past, but which seeks to interpret its deep meaning, its yearning for life, as the optimum condition for the conservation of historic remnants.
As a historian, an artist and an architectural inventor, Nik Spatari has reawakened the ancient stones within a museum complex destined to be one of the emerging facets of high culture linked to art, able to place a region like Calabria within an international vision, connecting and distinguishing the legacy of a thousand-year-old civilisation with the making of the new languages of technology and virtual reality.
Spatari always on the move….
Nik Spatari: painting-sculpture-architecture
A character who refuses to be pigeonholed, Spatari designs using archetypes, “because a space is perfect and communicates pleasure only when it is designed on the basis of simple ancestral forms”.
“Over the years”, says Spatari, “I became a man. I travelled across the continents. But I have a deep connection with the Mediterranean. I strongly belong to the Mediterranean, king of forms and light, and, in the Mediterranean, Calabria, a decisive light and an imperative landscape”.
ARCHITECTURE
The work of spatariane artistic synthesis highlights a relationship with history that strongly characterizes the approach of the master. Spatariane works are characterized by a strong sculptural expression that draws from ancient and primitive forms and associations. They present biblical, cosmic and mythological themes in a vocabulary that mixes symbolic abstraction with the outside world. The wide range of offerings testifies to the sensitive research carried out in techniques and the recovery of ancient symbolic references reinterpreted in a modern key. This re-reading and revisitation of the past is a search for inspiration in new designs and colours where figures are no longer purely ornamental.
Drawing, marking out profiles, defining surfaces, recognizing volumes and spaces is, first of all, to be able to observe and to discover. Only in this moment can the intuitive phenomenon occur, can you invent and create! A synthesis, then of the built, but also of the compositional process. The sculptural element denotes an extraordinary feeling for space and a well-judged interpretation of immense spatial possibilities. Architecture is shaped, like veritable sculpture. Every architectural element, without ever losing its function, is a sculpture packed with expressiveness, following the aesthetic of the archaic art forms of the great civilisations.
The research by forms under light.
To dominate space and proportion in all things, this is the true intention of Spatari in his plastic research. Painting, mosaic, sculpture and architecture are specifically dependent on space, bound to the need to manage it, each with appropriate methods. The key to aesthetic emotion is a spatial function.
The artist is essentially a shaping agent: the plastic dimension is what rises into the space; in its moulding one can recognise the plastic virtues. Architecture is intelligent play, rigorous and magnificent, with volumes in light. It is within this continuity with tradition and study of the past that MUSABA’s modern reinterpretation of function and meaning must be located, as a place characterised by a living, fertile aesthetic for the future of art. In the continuity of spatariane experience, within different art forms, his paintings, his sculptures and his architecture do not constitute distinct chronological developments but mark the stages of the formation of a single creative personality. The construction of spaces through pure volumes, and in particular coloured volumes, because colour has evidently taken on new significance in spatial terms.
Spatari does not conceive of a banal and simplistic subordination of painting and architecture, that is, he does not conceive of a canvas or a sculpture as a function of an architectural whole or as a perspective of a merely decorative role. Every work complements another, which may appear far from the first, but – by means of an analogy, an association or a contrast – returns and brings us closer to all Spatari’s other works, in a single entity that can be dismantled and rebuilt and which is profoundly coherent in itself. The architecture and mosaics of his later years can be fully understood only when considered in the light of this extensive research. A limpid emergence of symbols, a moving rapport with the natural surroundings and their history.
