Emilien BOUTEILLE

Cuore di Argilla was born from the artistic project of a restorer and a sculptor from Venice, who decided to create love creations.
It all started spontaneously one morning in March, when the horizon is clouded by fog and the light is diffused so much that you can't look at the sky.
We were taking a walk through Venice like every Sunday but this time Piazza San Marco was as if it were there just for us, because there was no trace of the myriad tourists who usually populate it, we wondered about beauty, both the natural one that we it was donated both of what man was able to create through his ingenuity.
It was the first months of 2020 when the area was tense, not only at the atmospheric level especially for what was happening, the whole world was gripped by the plague of the virus of which almost nothing was still known except that it brought, in several cases , upon death, we felt powerless.
Just in those moments, mindful of a visit to the Sanctuary of the Madonna dell’Arco, in Naples, just a few months earlier, we thought back to those walls full of ex-votos.
The ex votos are in ancient times objects offered as a gift to the divinity by grace received or in fulfillment of a promise.
At that time, this artifact took the name of "ex voto" and had to possess important characteristics from an aesthetic point of view, since it represented a public or private gesture towards a Catholic figure, who, having been prayed or evoked, had interceded with the common mortal, saving him from certain death.
Most of these artifacts were hearts, hearts of all kinds and features, precisely because the heart since the dawn of time has been a symbol of infinite love and the engine of human feelings.
Just at that moment we decided that we too wanted to make an ex voto to be able to thank for everything we have and ask for the grace for all our loved ones.
Not being able to leave the house and having limited materials, we decided to take the clay in hand. We had stock in the house because we are a couple of restorers and sculptors, so we used the material we know how to work best. The first heart was a discovery, a result that surprised us even though we were in the trade.
Seeing how our feeling of anguish and fear had taken on the features of an object so beautiful and full of positive meanings immediately gave us a sense of peace.
Realizing that this beauty and meaning could not be limited only to us, we decided to try to make others, each thinking of a special person around us, so that maybe there was an intercession of grace for them too in this dramatic moment.
As soon as we shared the fruits of our work, a work of stylistic improvement, still wanting to achieve relevant aesthetic results, because beauty has always been the indisputable engine of our life under the banner of art that led us to contemplate it in Florence, Rome, Naples and finally Venice, we also looked for values ​​to attribute to each heart.
Not only the singularity and the unique characteristics of each of them, just like the people who would then have kept it, but by searching for meanings.
Painting them, once extracted from the oven, made the clay heart not only more beautiful but also more "alive" and faithful to convey the feelings of those who would later receive it.
The use of colors is essential for us, not only for our working background, but also because we grew up in Italy and, albeit in diametrically opposed parts, we were both surrounded by art. Paintings, frescoes, tapestries have colored our memories, those of an Italy cradle of art and symbolism to which, in our small way, we would like to refer.
Listening to the feedback from those who have a Heart of Clay we are satisfied in knowing that everyone has good vibrations by receiving our hearts even if everyone is different and each person in turn can attribute the closest value to his soul at that precise moment.
We like to think that every heart has a keeper, just a person who takes care of it and who finds in him something totally unique spiritual and artistic. For this there are many variants of Heart of Clay because each person has his own and is not subject to replication.
The uniqueness of creation gives a value that we are no longer used to seeing and this is perhaps one of the key points of our proposal.
The Hearts of Clay are surrounded by wings that allow the intrinsic feeling to rise to the sky and instead carry a precious message inside them.
Each of the metal details that are inserted into the hearts are made by a craftsman from Naples, a master of traditional land art and a skilled connoisseur of the meanings of the symbols we are going to insert, such as the heart with the seven swords that .