magazine n.30 – Agosto / Ottobre 2005
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ORIENT EXPRESS
Magazine Volume 22 – Number 1 – 2005
By John BruntonVENICE FOR CONNOISSEURS
Discover the real city with Venice resident John Brunton’s guide to the latest trends in this timeless, yet ever-changing city.
Spectacular shopping
Great destinations for memorable gifts and exclusive fashions.
Innovative Neckwear
The eccentric designer known simply as Gualti has opened a boutique showcasing innovative jewellery that has become a firm favourite with chic Venetians. These sensuous, handmade designs are crafted from a mysterious, maleable material.
Rio Terà Canal, Dorsoduro 3111.
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LA NUOVA di Venezia e Mestre
” E per gioiello, un fiocco di luce “
di Alessandra Artale – 20 Febbraio 2005
E per gioiello, un fiocco di luce
Le creazioni veneziane di Gualti conquistano la FloridaGioielli, emozioni che giocano con le linee e la luce, creature diafane fluttuanti e leggere che avvolgono il corpo, bracciali, orecchini, spille, gorgiere: scenografiche sculture da indossare. Il senso di leggerezza aleggia in tutta l’opera di Gualti, giovane artista capace di creare oggetti magici con la materia impalpabile delle sue resine, il vetro, i piccoli cristalli tenuti insieme da fili di nylon trasparenti, che per mezzo di sottili alchimie si ricollegano con le piume e i tessuti attraverso le vie contorte fra l’ordine e il disordine..
Nel piccolo e curatissimo atelier di rio Terà Canal, a pochi passi da campo Santa Margherita, le sue creazioni appaiono come vere esplosioni di luce, che nascono da un cuore di vetro per poi dipanarsi in filamenti flessibili e trasparenti che vanno a formare gioielli che nulla hanno a che vedere con la bigiotteria.
La spilla è l’oggetto che Gualti, nome d’arte di Gualtiero, predilige, anche se ora si è lanciato in nuove sperimentazioni: scarpe eleganti in raso di seta realizzate su misura da scegliere in 85 tonalità di colore, da abbinare a borsette che personalizza con piume, cristalli e piccole luci, tali da ricordare le scarpette da Cenerentola. Tra poco esordirà con gli abiti, sempre su misura, intesi come sculture che cambieranno intorno al corpo, così come le sciarpe e i coprispalle che già ha realizzato: morbida lana con un’anima per modellarle intorno al corpo.
In Florida un atelier di alta moda espone le sue «creature e la stampa internazionale gli ha già regalato molto spazio. Creature, le sue, per arricchire lo scrigno dei sogni.
(Alessandra Artale) -
ART & ANTIQUES
Magazine ( Czechoslovakia )
February 2005
Benátky se ještě k tomu během posledních let staly působiš- těm exkluzivních mladých umělců, pracují- cích buď s lehkostí a křehkostí moderních materiálů, jako je návrhář módních doplňků Gualti (www.gualti.it)
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
“Breathing More Easily Without the Throngs”
Sunday, December 19, 2004
by Mary Billard
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INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE
” Glasses and other ornaments that hinge on Venetian flair “
by Kate Singleton
Tuesday, July 29, 2003 – Page 7
Glasses and other ornaments that hinge on Venetian flair
By Kate Singleton, International Herald Tribune
July 29, 2003Excerpt from the article :
Gualti, a designer specializing in jewelry and body ornaments, describe what they produce as extensions of the body, offshoots of the wearer’s personality. Gualti’s work embodies all the lightness and delicacy of Venetian glass, yet is soft and pliable to the touch.
Editors’ Picks
“I’ve found that I can get a variety of different synthetic resins to capture and reflect light, and to move gently like tendrils in the breeze,” Gaulti said. “I also use glass beads in my compositions, and tiny fragments of flexible laminates that accentuate the impression of movement.”
Self-taught, Gualti has been experimenting with the expressive potential of all sorts of materials since he was a child. This aptitude placed him at odds with his farming family in the hinterland of Padua. Rather than have him go to art school, they had him apprenticed at the age of 14 to a ceramicist.
“In my free time, when I wasn’t drawing I was setting off on expeditions to find beautiful things,” Gualti said. “Roots were a particular passion. I think that’s where the undulating filigree of my designs comes from. A small band of much younger children used to trot along with me and we would display our discoveries on a white sheet. My father and grandfather thought there was something wrong with me. They wanted a son with manly pursuits.”
By the time he was out of his teens, Gualti knew he had to move away. He applied for a job doing fresco work in Mestre, on the mainland. During a trial period using what was for him a new medium, his inventiveness and eye for detail so impressed the owner that she persuaded him to show her the sculptures he had been making at home.
Gualti’s workshop and store (Dorsoduro 3111, Rio Terà Canal; tel 041 5201731; www.gualti.it) are in an area that has maintained some of the color and bustle of the artisan district it once was. The gleaming white walls of the showroom shimmer quietly with the almost liquid light reflected from the gently oscillating resin filaments that are a feature of his work.
Each piece is meticulously crafted by hand, with the hot point of a needle used to bore and solder. Headpiece, armband, earrings, ring, soon ties as well: These are small sculptures that embrace motion and eschew symmetry. Color and form are reminiscent of the glorious blown-glass chandeliers traditionally made on the Venetian island of Murano. Yet the hand that reaches out to touch pale petals and leaves of such apparent fragility is shocked and then enchanted to discover a light, submissive medium that will not shatter or deform.
Though Gualti created some astounding headpieces for clients confident of making an impact at the recently inaugurated Venice Biennale, he will have nothing to do with the fashion houses keen to co-opt him into producing accessories for their designer collections. “No way! I would feel oppressed, just as I did in my teens.”
What does interest him is extending his experience to video and perhaps thereafter to the theater: the most natural development in a city that saw the birth of opera and whose every corner is a stage set.Kate Singleton is a writer based in Italy.
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FOUR SEASONS
Hotels and Resorts Magazine –
Volume 11 – Issue 1 – Spring 2003Hot Stops
against the TIDE
Off-season Venice lures a heady crowd
BY VALERIE WATERHOUSESea snakes, orchids, and raindrops are some of the inspirations for one-of-a-kind jewellery at GUALTI (Rio Terà Canal, 3111 Dorsoduro; 041-520-1731), fashioned by owner Gualtiero Salbego from transparent resin and glass (€100- €250). Fairy-tale pieces include anemone inspired necklaces made from long, transparent filaments, each capped with a tiny glass bead (€100-€250). Salbego also creates made-to-meas- ure cigarette-heel pumps and slingbacks from satin silk (€199-€400). Aristocratic glass designer Marie Brandolini and San Francisco grand dame Dodie Rosekrans are among Gualti’s well-known clients.
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MONDO SHOEBAGS
Magazine
Fashion Trends Materials Interviews2003
GIOIELLI-SCULTURA CHE STUZZICANO I SENSI
La morbidezza della seca, il profumo delle misture di resine sintetiche, le stimolazioni visive di nuovi percorsi creativi. E’ un’esperienza sensoriale quella che si vive nell’accostarsi alle crea- zioni di Gualtiero Salbego, in arte Gualti, un giovane artista che nel proprio atelier veneziano produce, sperimentando sulla materia, accessori (scarpe e borse in raso di seta disponibili su ordinazione tra 85 tonalità) e monili (vetro e resine).JEWEL-SCULPTURES TANTALIZING THE SENSES
The suppleness of silk, the fragrance of concoctions of synthetic resins, visual stimulations for new creative outlets. A sensorial experience that is felt in
approaching the creations of Gualtiero Salbego, in art Gualti, a young artist who in his Venice workshop produces and experiments with materials and accessories (shoes and handbags in satin available by special order in 85 different tones), and necklaces (glass and resin).
www.gualti.it
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ORNAMENTA MODA BIJOUX
Magazine anno VII. n°27 dicembre 2002
Editorial Page 69Cult Bijoux
GUALTIA Venezia gioie e ornamenti del colore dell’iride luccicano e brillano in una bottega candida come zucchero filato, in cui si respira aria di poesia e creatività Gualtiero Salbego trasforma emozioni, sogni e fantasie in spille, pendenti, gorgiere di fili sottilissimi, stole, corsetti, borse e scarpe da Cenerentola.
I suoi gioielli in resina, interamente eseguiti a mano, rivelano morbidezza, fluidità e piacevole aderenza alla pelle. Volute, riccioli o
filamenti sottili, conferiscono volume alle creazioni di Gualti, il cui cuore è spesso costituito da un’”iride” cangiante, ora opalescente, ora opaca.
Gli accostamenti cromatici sono insoliti e rari. L’artista, attentissimo ai dettagli, crea sfumature e gradazioni di colore a pennello e spesso utilizza la luminescenza della foglia d’argento per donare ai suoi ornamenti riflessi lunari.In Venice, iris-coloured jewels and ornaments sparkle and shine in a workshop snow-white like spun sugar, where you breathe an air of poetry and creativity.
Gualtiero Salbego transforms emotions, dreams, and fantasies into brooches,
pendants, and ruffs of the finest threads, stoles, corsets, bags and Cinderella’s shoes.
His jewels in resin, entirely handmade, display softness, fluidity and a pleasing bond with the skin. Spirals, curls and fine filaments lend volume to Gualti’s creations, whereby the heart is often created from an iridescent, opalescent and opaque “iris”.
The chromatic combinations are unusual and rare. The artist, very attentive towards detail, creates shading and colour shades with a paintbrush and often uses the luminescence of silver leaf to regale his ornaments with lunar reflections.
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THE WASHINGTON POST
” VENICE, VIDI, VICI “
Falling in Love With This Romantic City Isn’t Easy
by Chris Lehmann – April 28, 2002
( English text )
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/travel/2002/04/28/venice-vidi-vici/beed1a94-4479-49b1-a132-e2d43d06e481/Excerpt from the article :
Of course, a less unwitting evocation of Venice’s character comes from those who have swooned headlong into Venice’s gauzy, improbable flight from the fusty realities that shape the lives of other cities. Consider, for instance, the local merchant Gualti, the proprietor of a small but flamboyant jewelry boutique off the Campo Santa Margherita.
Gualti’s shop boasts a host of odd plastic-looking pendants, earrings and rings in various shades of purple. Purple, too, is the prose in the explanatory manifesto Gualti has mounted alongside his creations. It explains that the objects are indeed plastic — or, as Gualti puts it, “little polymeric jewels springing from the skilled hands of our amphitryon.”
And he’s just warming up. The jewels are evidently wraparound affairs that can shape-shift in any direction, to virtually any size: “Rings with anthropormorphic suggestiveness, bangles which surround the arm in an attempt to wrap the whole body, necklaces that capture the subject like spider webs and transform [it] into a complementary object. . . . Bodies, birds, collars, jewels — ornaments to dress a way of life that finds its natural status in Venice because in Venice one is masked all the time.”
As our faux Valley dude back in the bar might have said, “Whatever.” Yet, by the time we stumbled onto Gualti’s manifesto, we had to concede he had a point. For a city suspended on poles plunged into the floor of a lagoon, the mundane forces of place and time can seem as frivolous, shape-shifting and self-consciously silly as Gualti’s sculpture-jewelry. In the long sunset of its imperial decline, Venice had come to stake most of its identity on illusion. Somehow this reflection, like McCarthy’s image of the city as a folding picture-postcard, was oddly fortifying.As was another: Among other things, the fond civic dreams of Venice, which have inspired enthusiasts from Titian and Tintoretto, Casanova and Henry James, Ruskin and Byron, on down through Gualti, can be an allegory of romantic love, another supranatural wonder constructed in defiance of the grim determinisms of environment and history, and crafted from presumptions ultimately no more outlandish than those behind Gualti’s wares.
It was a charming, consoling thought — and if nothing else, our sojourn in Venice taught us what a deceptively simple thing it is to be charmed. What more can you ask of a honeymoon?
Chris Lehmann is deputy editor of The Washington Post Book World.
On his honeymoon in Venice, the author discovered the city’s central truth: There is no central truth. It may take a while, but the charms of Venice will finally reveal themselves.
