Adriano Candelori exhibition

by Robert Lloyd

Llanelli sculptor Adriano Candelori is staging a special exhibition of his work at Llanelli’s Parc Howard Museum and Art Gallery this summer.

Entitled ‘Adriano Candelori, Sculptor, a retrospective’, the show starts on Saturday, June 29 and runs until September 28.

Adriano Candelori, originally from Terni, Umbria, in Italy, came to Wales after World War Two, during which, like many young men of his time, his education and career prospects had been interrupted by the German occupation of his town.

While in Wales, visiting family in Llanelli, Adriano secured an employment contract with the Steel Company of Wales for which he initially worked as a ‘Behinder’ in the Old Castle Tinplate Works.

After the term of his contract, he remained in the town, married a local girl and has lived and worked in Llanelli for more than 50 years, participating fully in the life of the community and working in education.

His wife, Shirley Jenkins is the daughter of Hector and Nellie Jenkins of Jenkins Bakery, Llanelli,.

His son Dominic works as a teacher in international education in Austria.

Following his Steel Company contract, Adriano set up his own business in residential interior and exterior design through which his artistic abilities manifested themselves in house design, though his heart was always in sculptural art.

Adriano was able to study English and at the same time continue his pursuits in art/sculpture in evening classes.

In 1979, the Art Inspector for Wales, who had especially admired his work at various exhibitions, recommended him to a course of full time education in 3D Art & Design and he gained entry to the Dyfed College of Art as a mature student.

Adriano achieved the Diploma in Sculpture and 3D Design, and was also nominated and awarded to a Licentiateship of the Society of Designer Craftsmen. He also became a member of the Society of Artists and Designers in Wales and also the Wales Craft Council.

Influenced by Etruscan, Roman, Classical and Renaissance art all around him in Italy and with which he grew up, Adriano’s sensitivity to beauty of form and design makes him a lover of the ancient arts.

Though inspired by the visual arts of the past, Adriano breathes his own 20th Century appreciation into the creation of his modern subject matter.

Adriano has worked as a tutor in ceramic sculpture for a variety of adult courses and at many centres of education.

His works are a dramatic attempt to express a strength of feeling, especially his Craftsmen at Work/Craftsmen of the Past series: a meaningful tribute to the dignity of a bygone age, now replaced in time by technology, but whose craftsmen and their crafts are not forgotten, recorded for our industrial archaeological heritage.

This magnificent collection, all meticulously sculpted in terracotta, is a tribute to all the craftsmen of the past, including the tinplate doublers, coal and copper miners, slate splitters, coopers, wheelwrights and blacksmiths; in these works, Adriano always emphasises the artist/craftsman aspect of his subjects and his interest in them; it is then, in turn, that the craftsman in him researches, works out, designs, measures, shapes and creates what he, as the artist, sees in the subject.

The breadth and scope of his works show a versatility in a wide range of subjects and mediums: particularly beautiful are his relief sculptures in stone: The Unicorn and The Dragon, also there are the impressive metal sculptures, abstracts illustrating a fine appreciation of form, line and balance: in bronze: Etude, Tafod Y Ddraig, The Musical Clefs, and in aluminium: The Phoenix.

These works in metal he created in a local foundry where he was able to cast and finish the metal sculptures. In modern fibreglass the imposing Doubler (on steel) and Study of a Miner (on a solid block of anthracite coal) dominate the viewer. Then finally in traditional terracotta clay, his studies of craftsmen and his many portrait heads, busts and figurative studies reveal a delicacy of creation and impressive detail, all representing his capacity for beautiful workmanship.

Adriano’s trophies, each individually designed and created, represent a further particular art form, especially the ash and silver Lois Blake Welsh Folk Dancing Trophy, presented annually by The Welsh National Eisteddfod; the rosewood and silver Llanelli Star Young Musician of the Year; and in bronze and steel fibreglass, his Dramatic Masks.

With such versatility, covering a wide range of materials, methods, crafts and subjects, Adriano finds working with terracotta the most challenging and rewarding.

Producing such detailed work, after much preparations, research, study and creation, then to open the kiln and find all in perfect order is the greatest pleasure.

The majority of his works are therefore in terracotta, including portrait busts of his son Dominic, Rhodri Morgan (the former First Minister of the National Assembly for Wales) and The Millennium Christ, which will shortly be on its way to permanent display in the Terni cathedral.

Website: http://www.candelori.org