Celotto - Nino Gobbis - Panel - Wood, Faesite

Panel by Nino Gobbis, faesite engravings in relief on faesite.
This 90 x 45 panel shows a workmanship carried out with extreme mastery of using the gouge to obtain the raised reliefs.
The composition belongs to the climate of informal research in decoration from the 1950s/60s, a kind of archaic writing in which forms resembling masks, eyes, figures, architectures appear, almost pictograms, without ever becoming an explicit narrative.
The contrast between the warm, earthy background and the black mark, very material and irregular. The effect recalls certain studies from the 1950s–60s interested in primitivism, graffiti, matter and sign, more than pure geometric abstraction. The shape of the support itself, with beveled corners, reinforces the character of a panel/art object, typical of a period when the boundaries between painting, ceramics, decoration and design were highly permeable.

Nino Gobbis used faesite (or Masonite) as a matrix. Being an industrial material free of natural veining, it allows for precise lines and uniform fields and a surface decidedly harder and more resistant.
The object testifies to an era in which Arreda di Celotto furniture represented, with these inserts, the interior decor of the time.

Gobbis collaborated with Arreda di Celotto, which in the 1950s produced furniture designed by famous Italian architects and designers such as Piero Celotto, commissioning decorative panels from artists like Nino Gobbis to furnish bourgeois homes, offices, hotels, or ocean liners. This type of art unites artistic craftsmanship with design production, integrating sculpture perfectly with the interior architecture of the era.
The panel has undergone no treatment and preserves all its charm.

Nino Gobbis, Italian painter and printmaker active in the mid-20th century, a figure deeply linked to the world of author’s interior design and Treviso’s mid-century modern memorabilia of the 1950s and 60s.

These panels are characterized by a typographically graphic aesthetic, with motifs that reflect the European avant-garde of the first half of the century (with geometric and abstract references adapted to the geometric and organic taste of the 1950s).

Statement of provenance:

I declare that the present panel comes from the private collection of the Celotto family of Montebelluna, in whose possession it has remained since the time of its creation. The work subsequently became part of my private collection and is being offered for sale with this provenance statement, given in good faith.

For shipping, the object is protected by either a double plywood state or by corrugated cardboard, 5 cm thick to prevent damage during transport; unfortunately, this affects shipping costs.