On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Ottavio Missoni Tapestry Room, the Ottavio and Rosita Missoni Foundation presents the restaging of Ottavio Missoni's first solo exhibition at the Navigliovenezia Gallery in 1975.

"The charm of Missoni's fabrics, at a particular moment of Liberty revival, lies in the material value that accentuates the artisanal origin and also in the Central European color. Missoni is from Zara, operated in the Dalmatian and Triestine area, attracted since the early formation by the secessionist resonances of Vienna, even though long overshadowed as a critical stimulus but still lives in the atmosphere of the entire environment. The variations in purple, green, gray, pink, black, and silver, with subtle cold stridors, acquire an almost tactile consistency, more evident in the sketches where the real threads accumulate in material assemblages.

This artisanal taste therefore makes one feel the predominance of the hand over the machine: the hand that at the beginning, as the roots suggest, was not disconnected from the mind: mànus mâ mà-nam mind, just as the machine was not disconnected from the idea of magic, màchina mechanè-magh magician the machine. Yet Missoni is a designer who designs, in thousands of sketches, the patterns and chromatic harmonies of the fabrics, which are then executed by machine: but with eccentric care he makes the value of knitted fabric felt, as if it were handmade. In short, he does not destroy the artisanal premises, in the often wide weave, without anonymous machine pedantries: the machine itself is for Missoni, still, a continuation of the hand, machine-magician, as in times when the industrial revolution had not yet occurred. The palette, and even the black designs, recall the fabrics of Mackintosh, Klimt and the Viennese School, but also certain Klee and certain Kandinsky of the Blue Rider of Monaco: at the beginning of his activity he did not yet have such a clear cultural consciousness as today, but for years in the Milanese environment Missoni frequents artists, exhibitions, has been able to study better the relationships with the sources that have stimulated in him affinities of sympathies.

It must be said, however, that his fabrics do not remain an autonomous fact, they come to life in the cut, in the invention of clothes, which have given Missoni fame beyond national borders: the correspondence of the fabric to the line of the garment - fabric and line conceived by the same mind (always supported by the active collaboration of Rosita) - gives everything original accents, now not easily confusable. In a period where aesthetic manifestations have expanded to overflow, this value of hand-mind and machine-magician is not a return, a step back: it is simply an awareness of the possibilities that artisanal premises, in full technological civilization, can still offer naturally."