Costantino Nivola’s clay artworks and my own perception of art

Costantino Nivola was a Sardinian artist. He was born in Orani in 1911 and died in New York in 1988. The most famous artworks by Nivola are the female sculptures, inspired by Cicladic art. Little less known are the male sculptures and the sand casts. Even less known, the series of artworks made from fired clay (terracotta): the beds, the beaches and the swimming pools.

The beds are little sculptures picturing the several aspects of a couple’s life: love, happiness, but also loneliness. The beaches represent the peaceful and harmonious union of the mankind with nature.

From the Seventies, Nivola took a very critical position on contemporary society. Therefore, the beds became the background for ugly and vulgar scenes. The beaches became overcrowded places. With this in mind, Nivola created the series of the swimming pool, inspired by the touristic resorts that were starting to arise in those years in the United States, where the artist moved thirty years before. Therefore, the swimming pools are chaotic nonplaces, crowded with ugly people.

The swimming pools are exactly the opposite of the beaches and are one of the artworks that changed my perception of art. Today sustainable tourism is quite a common topic, but Nivola had the intuition of this issue a few decades in advance and warned us using images with a strong visual impact. In this way, the political message is being communicated through an esthetic code. This is not something new in art, but to me, in that specific moment of my life, it was the key to understand this dimension of art, as the message was written exactly in my language. It was also the key for me to understand the political messages of non-contemporary artists, with a completely different sensitivity, such as Goya, Géricault and Picasso.