Faust Cardinali
Visual artist and goldsmith Faust Cardinali was born in Paris in 1961 and lives and works in Paris and Tuscany.
His work features in major public and private collections in Europe and Asia. He has designed site-specific installations such as Baptême-une affaire liquide (Saint Sulpice Church, Paris, 2001) and “Cinq cent mille artistes” (Château de Poznan, Poland, 2006), and has presented resin sculptures in exhibitions such as ‘Repérage’ (Inter Gallery Art Center, Seoul, 1994) and “En attendant 20(0)12” (Espace Julio Gonzalez, Paris, 2005), and produced architectural projects including “Undercover” in the iGuzzini showroom in Paris in 2005. His jewelry sculptures have been exhibited at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (Paris, 2013 and 2018), at the IRCAM-Centre George Pompidou (“Dix reliques vivantes,” Paris, 1998) and at exhibitions including “Medusa, bijoux et tabous” at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2017) and “Objets Ambigus” at the Musée Bozar in Brussels (2018).
In 2009, Faust Cardinali created COPYRITTO, a new concept in the limited edition production of jewelry sculptures. He presented his “Manifesto of Artists Jewellery” at a conference at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (Paris) in 2013. Guest of honor with Yoko Ono and Pol Bury at Artistar (Milan, 2018), in October 2019 as part of Milan Jewelry Week, he held a series of conference-performances on the theme “Where Faust becomes art - body and/or jewelry.”
For 35 years, Faust Cardinali has been building an artistic universe where there is no longer any difference between a monumental installation, a sculpture, and a text—for him, artistic jewelry engenders the freedom to bring together all precious materials that live/coexist with the poorest, in the same desire for philosophical and formal balance/imbalance. Taking into account all the psychological facets of our society, through the prism of a futuristic and archaeological idea, the material becomes sensual, clumsy, profound, provocative, classic, and avant-garde all at once: new poly-bodies appear and question us about the very existence of the body, or at least about the idea that jewelry may no longer need to be worn, because it is autonomous, self-sufficient. Silver, gold, aluminum, plastic, charred bread, polyvinyl resin, precious stones, diamonds... the ideal palette for jewelry that becomes an immense sculpture, or a monumental installation that becomes tiny.
Faust Cardinali has been represented by the MiniMasterpiece Gallery since 2013.
