From September 12 to November 3, 2024, on the occasion of the 24th edition of festivalfilosofia (Modena, Carpi and Sassuolo, September 13, 14 and 15, 2024), in the spaces of the Sale della Musica, degli Incanti and dei Sogni of the Ducal Palace of Sassuolo - Gallerie Estensi (Modena), Marazzi Group presents the exhibition Gianni Berengo Gardin. Marazzi, le linee veloci, curated by Alessandra Mauro.

The exhibition, realized in collaboration with Gallerie Estensi, Contrasto, Fondazione Forma per la Fotografia and Archivio Gianni Berengo Gardin, celebrates the 50th anniversary of the rapid single-fired patent by presenting a precious photographic corpus created by Gianni Berengo Gardin for the company, far from traditional documentary photography but almost unique in the history of the great photographer.

It was in 1974 when Marazzi, a leading company in the ceramic production sector, invented the rapid single-firing, a revolutionary technological patent that forever changed the tile production process. To document this technological leap, essential not only for the company but for the entire sector, three years later the photographer Gianni Berengo Gardin was invited to document these new production lines.

As always, the company gave him total expressive freedom, not requiring precise documentation but relying on his creativity. The photographer found himself immersed in a clean, efficient environment with an international flavor, where he was particularly fascinated by the production speed and the conveyor belt where colors, shapes, and designs seemed to blend in a vortex: the subject of the project thus became, almost immediately for him, the colorful rhythm of production, very different from other industrial contexts in which he had worked.

The challenge for the photographer was to capture and return in the form of a shot the flow of colors and shapes, crystallizing moments of the production process as if they were tiles of a mosaic. The use of color became a mandatory choice, as well as a change of perspective: Berengo Gardin approached the subjects, focused on details, and concentrated the lens on forms that became abstract. The images he created thus became pieces of a large mosaic, a photographic fresco taking shape within the space of work, narrated as an abstract universe, a dynamic flow, a dance of colors and shapes. The result is a corpus with an unprecedented aesthetic signature for the author, combining precision and poetry, telling the story of "the colorful and fast-paced time of changing work".