like Santo Tomaino, and of artists who use photography like Giulia Caira: on the other hand the grotesque painting is a motif, since its very birth, renaissance and revival, tightly connected with the wall, graphic, textile and ceramic adornment. However Chastel put us a more specific question, underlined by the italic type utilization in the expression “dans l’art”, thus meaning also the “major” one and in fact gave a first answer indicating as examples of the Twentieth century grotesque paintings some works by Alexander Calder, Paul Klee and the labyrinthical ones by Saul Sceinberg. We are now living in the Twenty-first century: but I could still attempt convincing topical examples of “grotesque painting” in the contemporary art. I am thinking to the group of young English artists clamorously raised above the others in the last fifteen years, starting from the “Freeze” exhibition in 1988, at present honoured in London in the “Saatchi Collection” exhibition at the County Hall. And it is not just a case that precisely among the “grotesque” English artists one is very important for what concerns the ceramics specific matter. This person is Grayson Perry, finalist at the Turner Prize 2003 and very talented ceramics writer. I am interested in Perry just now as theorist of a new technical and aesthetic work consistence: “Artists are too much of the intellectual type and the academical culture downgrades the physical presentation of the works (…). They think merely it is enough to have a good idea; everything is connected with a concept which asserts that who indulges in physical pleasure is not serious”. This is the reason of an argument I had once with those ceramists who are not aware that this overestimate of the Fine Arts is old and that it is really from a new declaration and stationing of independence of the applied art, of course supported by a different project culture, that it is possible to lead upsetting incursions into the other field, to reinforce who inside represents a “crisis element” like precisely Grayson Perry, with his assigning again a fundamental value to the “aesthetical”, technical- realizing factors in every art.
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