Passionate about drawing and painting since his young
age, Luigi Romani is graduated at the Art School in Rome and is admitted
to the course of study for Industrial Design at the
ISIA of Rome to specialize two years later on Digital Technologies in
Florence. After a career into a digital
graphics domain that will lead him over time to specialize as a Web
Designer in London and Paris, he was fascinated by the
French ceramic production attending the atelier of Sandrine Tonnelier.
That contact will awaken his old passions for manual
artistic activity and will begin to grow in him an
authentic passion for handmade ceramics.
He then
decided to deepen his knowledge in the field of ceramics by following a
training course in La Borne, a renowned village in the
center of France populated by numerous ateliers of ceramic
craftsmen. He lived here for several months attending the most
important workshops and following the professional
training course for ceramists at the atelier of Agnes Chapelet, a
ceramist known for her experience and passion for
wood-burning with her Anagama oven, traditional in Japanese pottery
cooking. It is in this atmosphere, where
pottery is lived during the day in the workshops and in the evening
around one of the many wood-burning ovens engaged in
cooking all kinds of clay objects, that he begin to learn
all the secrets for processing clay. From manual work
to wheeling, from the preparation of engobes and glazes to the final
firing of the clay, perhaps the most important thing he
learns from this experience is the need for a ceramist to establish
an innate contact with the clay, a relationship that he
interprets and experiences as a contemplative moment of
the action/reaction processes during the creation of his works.
Specialized in Raku cooking for several years now, Luigi Romani offers
to the public his sculptures that he creates inspired by the
original spirit of Japanese Raku based on free gestures,
unpredictability and surprise. His works are in fact the result of
instinctive gestures where the form, although originating
from a recognizable archetype, frees itself from the original
signification assuming new values. Following a
centuries-old tradition of artisan potters, its low-temperature glazes,
the result of careful research, are prepared exclusively
with natural raw materials. The colors of his works are characterized
by iridescent colors that he obtains with the a
post-reduction process typical of Western Raku, but also by opaque or
transparent colors with which he loves to enhance with
the tipical crackle effect - obtained by cooling a still hot piece with
air or water - and with the smoke that he makes interact
with the glaze and the unglazed clay during the combustion of a still
hot piece with paper, sawdust, leaves or pine needles.
