Speaking of ceramics, art and women, we cannot fail to mention the friendship that binds these four ceramists, more or less from Faenza, and their FACE project, which is still current and was presented in the last edition of Argillà Italia.
FACE is an acronym for Fiorenza, Andrea, Cristina and Elvira: four women artists who worked together to create a large unique work, made up of many small circular pieces, each one unique and different from the other, although all traceable to a limited and iconic series.
FACE literally means face, countenance, but also the ability to be able to look at and converse with those in front of us. Translated from the Latin fax facis, torch, it means a medium that can illuminate, and that helps us see even where meanings are deepest and most impenetrable.
Each individual artist worked in her own workshop, following her own style and using the material best suited to her, putting a small part of herself into each piece. All these, joined together, create a drape, a kind of large blanket, a macro-theme that accompanies us in all stages of life: from birth to death; it protects us and warms us during the moments of rest and during the night, when light gives way to darkness and our body and mind regenerate thanks to sleep.
The literary reference is the allegorical figure of the Homeric thalamus, the princely place of love and passions, the place of meeting and sharing, the place where life is generated and where it often finds its end. For Linus is that object that can convey a sense of warmth and peace, a transitional comfort-zone; "Linus's blanket" is now a proverbial saying to indicate something that gives security and that one cannot possibly deprive oneself of, a symbol of lost childhood, a magical and apotropaic protection. The blanket lulls us to sleep and keeps us company while we dream, and it is in the dream world that we find the great link between symbolism and the unconscious.
Looking for the first time at this work in fact we get involved on an emotional level, we seem to smell the scent of laundry, of sheets laid out in the sun; an intimate memory of childhood that makes us think of our grandmothers and sunny days, the scent of Marseilles. As we get closer, however, we become aware of the material of which it is made: ceramic, which is by no means soft and light! In fact, the work consolidates the feeling of an envelopment, an embrace, a comfort; and, having overcome the first perception and read what the artists have enclosed in their individual pieces, we realize how this quilt investigates the subjectivity of relationships and the depersonalization of society.
Fiorenza Pancino in her microworlds wrote about numbers reminding us how, in mass phenomena or tragic events, everything is reduced to number series. Perhaps it is just our attempt to give order to chaos, a procedure to be able to study reality with objectivity and detachment, to find algebraically a formula that can define a situation. Fiorenza with her irony contradicts this sterile approach: in a broader design such as the blanket, these numerical elements acquire another meaning, they merge and mingle like an embroidery with the other artists' pieces creating a visual rhythm different from the simple numerical value that is normally attributed to them.
Instead, Andrea Kotliarsky forged tokens by exploiting the roundness of the single module. Yes, those very coins we used to use in telephone booths before cards, although nowadays we only use them in video games and slot machines and even the telephone booth is a distant memory. The token, by its very nature, can only be used once, kind of like our lives. Indeed, it is emblematic that in video games when the game ends and the words "game over" appear. Each of us has only one token at our disposal, and we must know how to play it to the best of our ability! At one time the token sanctioned the length of a phone call, the time and intensity of a dialogue. In slot machines it can be the source of great wealth, if one is lucky. Each token is a life to be played, a blanket of tokens is a web of lives.
Cristina D'Alberto in her pieces penetrates, through the gaze, into the most intimate sphere of people, with the story she paints some emotions and fragments of their lives; the stories are interwoven like the warp and weft of a blanket. In each eye there is an individual vision of the history of the people he portrays, which is written and drawn thanks to the emotion generated by the encounter, and which leads the work into a parallel reality comparable to a dream, without chronological linearity, where feelings expand and deform time and reality. An unraveling of emotions that intertwine with the gazes of the viewer of the work, in a continuous renewal of dialogue. The meaning of a glance becomes eternal.
Elvira Keller focused on the macro-theme of the blanket as protection: birth blanket and death blanket. Two moments in life that bring us back to the theme of identity: we come into the world and are given a name, and, consequently, a social security number; by dying we leave a trace of our earthly identity. Dental records are our only real key to identity, even after death, being the only part of the body that persists after us, much more efficient and effective therefore than fingerprints, of which, as time passes, we lose all trace. His tiles investigate identity through what makes us unique and different, at once recognizable and catalogable, each of us a small part of the system, as each tile is an element of the blanket.
All these modules have been patiently stitched by the four artists on a loom structure, a large eight-handed patchwork where the elements represented are interwoven and mixed together; in the alternation they create a visual rhythm of refraction of light between glossy and matte surfaces, a depth of movement between decorated and etched surfaces. In the center is a box for each artist, a 7×7 in which we can recognize their individual message, because in every group work the focus always remains the individuality of its compounder. 
The work was exhibited at Argillà Italia 2018 in Faenza at Studio Calychantus in Corso Mazzini and at the Nove Portoni Aperti Ceramics Festival at Manifattura Barettoni formerly Antonibon curated by Elena Agosti, set up by Oscar Dominguez with the sponsorship of Ente Ceramica Faenza.