MOLBY JEWELRY

The jewels of F. Lucatelli aka Molby are born from an inner story, they are generated from ancient nursery rhymes handed down and each of them contains a meaning, an element of nature or a message that reminds us where we come from and where we are headed.

Its inspiration is reproduced in a crowd of concept-forms, characters or symbols, each with a life of its own.

Starting from the intrinsic beauty of a natural stone, the artist enhances its shape through a branching of metal and turns it into a “wearable object”, a never banal formal research that becomes food for thought.

Where, on the other hand, curiosity plays with ideas, the artist creates jewelery-objects that contain an evocative message. I would like to call these creations "pet jewelry". They are the result of that incessant inner narration mentioned at the beginning, where archetypes and introspective concepts strongly connected to the history of man, inseparable from nature as well as from feelings, echo. Small sculptures that sometimes hide unthinkable microcosms.

Francis does not like to reveal himself and immediately reveal his story, precisely because it has a very deep root. The work of the craftsman of more or less noble metals emerges first, treated with the hand of the goldsmith, the blacksmith and the tailor together, with simple tools, perhaps archaic, with which, his sometimes rough sculptor manual skills, inserts details minutes, he hints at subtle and subdued intuitions; a reminder only for those who are curious, who have ears to hear their little story.

They are often closed shapes, chests with small hinges and hooks that open with a click, showing surprises full of meanings that cause a tender amazement.

Otherwise they are different forms where the metal bends, ripples, breaks or stretches into symbolic surfaces evocative of nature and feelings, where something happens on some crack, fissure or caesura, small figures cling or a small boat of desperate sails. . Or niches like wombs that always hide a message, or even elements that can be opened that show a path of hope.

Objects with a soul through which the author silently offers all his rich inner world, where emotions and challenges, certainties and fears, popular wisdom and ancient memory crowd together.

A Lilliputian world of creatures that move in the magma of life where they show the fatigue of living, the pleasure of discovery, the gift of surprise and the child's play.

ROME April 2018 Valentina Bachini