Alessio Tasca Biography
Alessio Tasca, ceramist and designer, was born in 1929 in Nove (Vicenza) to Lidia Broglio and Edoardo; the mother comes from a lower middle class family, the father is an interior decorator and ceramic painter, but also a musician (he plays the violin and the piano accompanying silent films in cinemas or performing at parties). He remains unemployed due to his anti-fascist beliefs and leaves for Eritrea from where he returns after three years due to precarious health conditions. He died in Naples as soon as he disembarked from the return journey. In the difficult family and civil situation Alessio finishes primary school and dedicates himself to his favorite activity which is drawing, in which he improves by attending the studio of the painter and ceramist Giovanni Petucco and the local art school, specializing in ceramics. The predisposition for drawing and the encouragement of the ceramist Romano Carotti convince the family to let him continue his studies: for the occasion Carotti gives him a copy of Matteo Marangoni's book, "Saper vide", a fundamental text for the education of the young Tasca. He thus enrolled at the Art Institute of Venice, having the opportunity to assimilate the stimuli of a city that was then very culturally combative: The memory of Arturo Martini's recent lesson is still alive, while the signs of new trends matured, such as the Fronte Nuovo delle Arts and Spatialism. On 24 October 1948, together with his brothers Marco and Flavio, he created the Tasca Artigiani Ceramisti workshop, in via Mulini 6, and began to prepare a series of models inspired by the Novese tradition. The commercial failure of these typologies pushes the young Alessio to prepare a cycle of "modern" ceramics to be addressed to a different market, more attentive to the post-war needs of renewal: thus the first plates decorated with "graffito" on a green or brown background were born, in the most varied decorations. In 1949 he participated in the first exhibition of his career at the V Italian Exhibition of Sacred Art at the Angelicum in Milan, where he exhibited a terracotta Annunciation which, through Petucco's lesson, goes directly back to the sources of Martini's plastic art. In 1951 his participation in the Milan Triennale with the "earthy" and engraved dishes, chosen by Gio Ponti in one of his frequent trips to Nove, met with considerable success; the particularity of Tasca's production goes to the Milanese gallerist Totti who acquires the works for his gallery. In 1952 he participated for the first time in the Venice Biennale in the "Venice" Pavilion for decorative arts, with "vases and plates". In 1954 he participated in the Venice Biennale presenting a "Majolica table" and two "Trays with figures" in "Morelli green". In 1957 Tasca married Elva Pianezzola with whom he had three children: Marina and Vittore, ceramists and Saverio, musician. He left the "Fratelli Tasca" laboratory in October 1961 and opened his own atelier in via Roberti, designed by Gaspare Parolin, still a student of architecture, where he dedicated himself first and foremost to the shaping of a cycle of large, unique pieces, thus returning to actual sculpture. He returned to teaching in 1962, succeeding Giovanni Petucco in the chair of Plastics at the Art Institute of Nove, where he remained until 1978 and where the group of friends and colleagues was formed - Pianezzola, Sartori, Chemello, Tubini, Sebellin - who gives life to the renewal of content and teaching. At the 1964 Venice Biennale, again in the Decorative Arts section, he was awarded the 1st Prize (ex aequo with Pompeo Pianezzola) for ceramics. At the Gubbio Biennale in 1966 he obtained first prize in the craft section for the large "lobster red" majolica shield. In 1967, with the advice of the technician from Nova Ettore Leoni, for the mechanical part he developed the first die, a machine that allowed him to design and obtain the first works with a rectangular section via extrusion. He exhibited them for the first time in Treviso on 4 January 1968 at the "Studio d'Arte Arturo Martini". The same year he participated in the XIV Milan Triennale with 17 drawn pieces, including the cornovaso, perhaps the most representative "shape" of this cycle. The Triennale was occupied as part of the protest "demonstrations" of '68; Tasca concretely adheres, destroying all the works that should have been exhibited. In 1972 the Victoria and Albert Museum purchased a Cornovaso, which is still preserved and exhibited in the Decorative Arts section of the London museum. The international jury of the XV Triennale of Milan where he exhibited ceramics and plexiglass awarded him the Gold Medal Diploma for the methacrylate production created by the Fusina di Nove laboratory based on his idea. With a larger die in 1974 he extruded the first large sculptures: the "Spheres" cycle was born, obtained from a cylinder extruded on a grid matrix. His artistic contribution thus definitively returns to actual sculpture. At the International Ceramics Symposium in Bassano in 1978 he met the German ceramist Lee Babel with whom he established a human and artistic partnership that led him to frequent exhibitions in Germany and interventions in the area in Rivarotta, Fara Vicentino and Heilbronn. The following year he left the management of the Villa Roberti laboratory and moved to Rivarotta (on the border between Nove and Bassano) in the seventeenth-century building, previously home to historic ceramic kilns. He begins to restore the important artefact now reduced to a ruin, in a solitary work that will continue for ten years. In 1980 the Victoria and Albert Museum in London purchased the coffee service produced entirely by drawing in 1974. In the same year a collective exhibition of the group of ceramists took place at the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation, curated by Romano Perusini. In 1982 the great art historian Giulio Carlo Argan visited the premises of Rivarotta accompanied by the director of the Civic Museum of Bassano Fernando Rigon. In 1986 he developed a large vertical die to be able to extrude large-sized works; during a break in the restoration work on the Rivarotta artefact, he created a new cycle of stoneware and refractory sculptures which he exhibited in Heilbroon and Marostica, inaugurating a new phase of his work centered on the expressive value of "ruin" and drift. In 1989, with the historical supervision of Nadir Stringa, he organized the exhibition of ten years of restorations and findings of Rivarotta, inaugurated by a public speech by the writer Luigi Meneghello - Rivarotta - which was printed by the publisher Moretti & Vitali. In 1991 he received the task from the Municipality of Nove to carry out a "decoration" for the wall that runs along, on the south side, the area of the former Antonibon factory (later Barettoni) to replace the one he himself carried out in 1956 with mortars colorful and now worn out. In 1993 he built a small brick amphitheater on the hill of Fara. In 1995, a reflection on the further "narrative" possibilities of the extruded panels, resulting from the work for the Antonibon walls, led Tasca to carry out a "revisitation" of the great cycle of months frescoed in the interiors of Torre Aquila, in Trento.
