West Sky

"The 'Sky' works are splinters of heaven fallen to earth. They mirror the heavens, the earth, and the self, who is watching. My dream is to put one of my works on the sacred Greek island of Delos. Invisible. Glass is a water fossil, the water of the desert." Alessandro Diaz de Santillana uses color and form to interpret the four elements of the exterior world (air, earth, fire, and water) and the five senses of the interior world (sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch). His abstract sculptures are minimal yet sensuous. In West Sky, he translates the element of sky and its sense-associations (light, air, wind, cold, fresh, open) into a hard, reflective, aerodynamic vertical. This frozen silver zeppelin is made invisible by its mirrored surface, filled with air bubbles, which reflects the world around it. De Santillana is part of a famous glassmaking family. His grandfather, Paolo Venini (1895–1959), founded the influential Venini glassworks on the island of Murano in 1921. His father, Ludovico Diaz de Santillana (1931–1989), produced many well known designs for Venini. His sister, Laura de Santillana (b. 1955), is an independent artist whose work is also shown in this gallery.