Many of the forms are empty; the inner space creates an external tension. If these forms were full, it would be dead. The solid but empty form gives a massive appearance to the piece, yet you get a feeling of great lightness when you take it in hand.
Giampaolo Babetto
Giampaolo Babetto b. 1947
Born in 1947 in Padua, Giampaolo Babetto originally trained to be an architect in the 1960s, but when he realized he loved working directly with materials, he became a jeweler. As part of the venerated Padua School, Babetto looked to traditional goldsmith techniques and the rigorous, immaculate forms of the Renaissance (particularly those of architect Andrea Palladio) to create concrete, elegant pieces. He describes his “empty but solid” works as having “an inwardness”—sensitive objects that, by avoiding excessive decoration, “have a soul.” Babetto’s work has also evolved to be in conversation with the heroic forms of contemporary minimalists like Carl Andre and Donald Judd and his inclusion of enamel, beginning in the 1980s, was inspired by an exhibition of Japanese lacquerware that he saw at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
