Sanlorenzo, one of the world’s leading producers of yachts and superyachts was set to present the Naviganti exhibition, ‘A journey into Sanlorenzo’s shipyards’ at Oblong Contemporary Art Gallery in line with the Dubai Boat Show. We take a closer look at their work…
The exhibition was set to feature more than 30 black and white images by photographer Silvano Pupella, who uses his lens to give a visual tale of the harmony between craftsmanship and technology, that has over the last 60 years made Sanlorenzo absolute nautical excellence.
The evocative photographic portfolio which was put together within the La Spezia shipyard, reveals how each Sanlorenzo superyacht is the result of a complex and innovative project. Each boat over 40 meters long, comes to life from the hull, forged in metal like a work of art. With the work of skilled local artisans who pay attention to the smallest details, each piece is greatly unique and special, thereby assuring the desired reaction from the owner of every yacht.
The photos of Silvano Pupella thus recount the work of these highly skilled artisans, whose masterful craftsmanship makes these sophisticated and elegant yachts what they are, as if they were being crafted in a Renaissance workshop. Silvano’s decisive black and white, introducing us to the initial production stages of the steel superyachts, is able to excite the hidden charm and the intrinsic beauty of the unfinished products. Images, documenting the various preparatory stages of the metal hulls, can perfectly reflect the atmosphere of Sanlorenzo, not only from a technological perspective however, emphasize the irreplaceable practicality.
Gustavo Vélez Artist Gustavo Vélez was born in Medellin, Colombia in 1975. He started acquiring knowledge on the arts in his home town of Medellin, Colombia. He then moved to Italy and continued his studies in the Lorenzo de Medici Academy of Florence, Italy. He has exhibited his artworks throughout Asia, where the essence of his sculpture found a great admiration after several personal exhibitions and art fairs in Japanese cities such as Tokyo and Iwaki. In China, he exhibited at the Zhengzhou Art Museum in Guan Xiang and in Korea with a monumental installation at the Art sculpture park of Seoul. Gustavo Vélez’s sculptural process is a result of the figurative artist’s interpretation of life, abstracted from the reality of our world. Vélez transforms matter and materials into works that play between the figurative and the conceptual, between forms easily identifiable and others more abstract, full of movement, light, shadows and in search of the infinite.
Entwining elegant lines, the thin, light sculptures depict Vélez’s particular way of creating tri-dimensional shapes. From every angle, their forms are seamless and dynamic lines and shapes change when light changes, giving the spectator an infinite and multifaceted view of the pieces. Gustavo Vélez is like his works: young and full of energy, that waits only to find a form in his sculptures. He is nourished by a healthy enthusiasm for creating and by a strong passion for sculptures, which can be seen in his works, that seem to hardly be able to contain the unrestrainable creative fluidity. Vélez passes from the cubic presence, to almost just a modulated block of marble, to the slenderness of a cane. Skill, capacity, resoluteness, vision, all of this translated thanks to the hands of an artist, who insists in taking care of the form and of all of its details.
