During the last thirty years, the encounter of some important artists on the Italian scene with mosaic art and the Ravenna Academy of Fine Arts has taken place in the name of expressive freedom and experimentation, the blending of different art forms and the reworking of concepts, techniques and matter.
Among the many works that could have been displayed, the pieces shown best embody this poetic and stylistic variety. These include Flavio Favelli, who revises the concept of the fragment; Davide Medri with his monumental sculptures that engages a dialogue with the light of the surrounding environment; Carlo Pasini, who is fascinated by the possibility of creating living surfaces of a highly personal bestiary using drawing pins; Alessandro Pessoli, who makes mosaic art an extension of his paintings; Nicola Samorì, who devastates his figures and portraits as a rite of his artistic practice; Maria Luisa Tadei, who explores the anatomy of the eye in mosaic art as if it were the portal to a higher form of spirituality; and Antonio Violetta, among the most sensitive contemporary sculptors, who interprets mosaic art in such a way that just two tiles are enough to represent the hieratic gaze of Byzantine icons.