FNetti
Francesco Netti Award
2023
The Award was created on the initiative of the "Francesco Netti" Association - APS, with the intention of giving public recognition to personalities linked to the city who have contributed to bringing prestige to Santeramo with their work, talent, creativity and professional skills . The award pays homage to the spirit of enterprise and openness to the new, altruism, passion for one's own ideas that have marked Francesco Netti's life.
In this first edition, the APS "Francesco Netti" is supported by the Municipal Administration
Pasquale Natuzzi,
President of the Natuzzi Group, he began his career at a very young age.
The son of a cabinetmaker, at the age of 19 he opened a craft workshop in Taranto where, with three collaborators, he built sofas and armchairs for the local market. In 1962 he moved to Matera where he began a commercial experience which allowed him to get to know the problems and mechanisms of distribution in depth. In 1967, still in Matera, Pasquale Natuzzi returned to his first love: the production of sofas and armchairs, this time on an industrial level. In 1972 he founded Natuzzi Salotti Srl
A year later, due to a fire that completely destroyed the Matera factory, Pasquale Natuzzi decided to transfer production to Santeramo in Colle (Bari – Italy), where the Group's headquarters are currently located. In the early 1980s, during a trip to the USA, Pasquale Natuzzi saw the opportunity to make a fundamental change by specializing in the production of the leather sofa, an elite product at the time. In 1985, Natuzzi Upholstery Inc. was founded, based in New York, a company created to serve North American customers.
The successes achieved in the USA, confirmed by the listing on Wall Street in May 1993, projected Natuzzi to conquer other markets, mainly Europe and the Far East, where the Group confirmed its leadership in just a few years. In 1998, as further confirmation of the strong link with the American market, a building with futuristic shapes was inaugurated in High Point (North Carolina), designed by the architect Mario Bellini, which houses the offices of Natuzzi Americas and a large showroom of 8,000 square meters paintings.
THE AWARD : None on a red background
Measures 35x45 Year 2021
Velvet technique and pigments on canvas
Raffaele Quida
Meaning
Significant is the research of Raffaele Quida who in his artistic work tries not to represent, but to present time, observing its luxury.
"No one on a red background" is a work created on a red velvet base on which, delicately and meticulously, a mixture of material liquid has been superimposed, to the point of making it almost monochromatic.
The work becomes a presence by virtue of its evanescence, it highlights itself as a subject by virtue of its own difficulty in emerging in its representation. The physical object becomes memory making its transience feel; this transience is delicacy multiplied by the passage of time, which according to the artist can only be measured indirectly, through the succession of a sequence of movements, displacements and modifications.
Leaving the sensation of the flow of this invisible force, the essence of life in space exists only as a memory in the flow of its uninterrupted movement in time, as a mimesis of life itself.
June 2, 1968, lives and works in Lecce
Raffaele Quida
He developed his passion for art after completing his high school diploma when, after his first experiments in figurative art, he attended the Man Ray experimental art center in Cagliari. The dialogue with the Futurist Aeropainter Mino Delle Site at the Temple University of Rome dates back to this period of experimentation. From 2010 to 2015 he worked on large sheets of photosensitive paper placed between the incompletely built or abandoned walls of construction sites, presented for the first time in Palermo in a dialogue with the works of Luca Vitone.
At first sight simple architectures impressed on the sheets. In 2014 he worked on a series of time cards: this material becomes a means of highlighting the passage of time. By immersing sheets of paper in a black pigment contained in iron tanks, he marks and marks the time through numbers that calculate the period of immersion. Geolocations 2018, in the spaces of the Municipal Historical Archive of Palermo, reinterprets the now monotonous and standardized codes and schemes of landscape representation; they will then be exhibited in 2019” at the F. Sticchi Foundation for Art and Neuroscience in Maglie.
In 2019 at Palazzo Mazzarino in Palermo, curated by Daniela Bigi, he installed a platform of mirrors on the floor, which becomes a
recording device. His creations are the projections of a shared life, sensitive traces of a continuous and participatory passage, regulated by time and space that man, often in vain, tries to understand and manipulate. In 2021 he exhibited, with Giuseppe Spagnulo (Grottaglie, 1936-2016), "Perimeter of the sensitive" at the National Museum Palazzo Lanfranchi in Matera, curated by Giacomo Zaza, from an idea of Cosessantuno Arte Contemporanea. Also in 2021, "ALTARS", a two-person exhibition with Luigi Presicce, curated by Antonio Grulli and Carmelo Cipriani, in the spaces of the former church of San Francesco della Scarpa in Lecce.
In 2022, in the collective exhibition with Francesco Arena and Luigi Presicce at the Anna Marra Gallery in Rome, curated by Daniela bigi, he presented a series of works that encompass all his periods of conceptual representation.