The volume accompanies the solo exhibition of Andrea Anastasio presented from 17 October to 30 November 2020 at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples. Presented in the first-floor rooms devoted to Pompeian-style frescoes, the exhibition establishes an intense dialogue between recent ceramic works by Anastasio and the archaeological remains of Pompeii and the Vesuvian area.

The exhibition explores the aspects of Anastasio’s research into the history of artefacts, especially pre-industrial ones, and the aesthetic, cultural and philosophical issues that their survival poses in the present.

Six new collections of ceramic works created for Ceramiche Gatti 1928, the historic art workshop in Faenza of which Anastasio has been Artistic Director since 2017, are on display: Riflessi di Alta Quota (2018), Esodi (2019), Gli intervalli (2019), Volpedo (2018), Auree (2018) and Un fiore per 12 mesi for Galleria Giustini/Stagetti in Rome (2019). Each of these collections explores, both formally and conceptually, original relationships between our technological present, fragmented and accelerated, and the multiple forms by which the decorative arts and pre-industrial artefacts have interpreted community values, concrete needs, human aspirations and the symbolic universe in the past.