ALDO AJÒ

How could the Civic Museum not welcome with open arms the works by the famous ceramist from Gubbio, Aldo Ajò, (1901-1982), when his widow, Ines Spogli, kindly donated them to the Ceramics Collection? The dominant feature of Ajò’s work is, undoubtedly, the  harmonious fusion it achieves between tradition and innovation, how it links the expressivity of avant-garde taste to reminiscences of Man’s ancestral dimension. Ajò’s lustreware surpasses the heights attained by classical Renaissance maiolica, but so as to glide more freely and with greater originality through bold experimentation in tonalities of colour and iridescences which are almost visionary. His fascinating Mermaid is an example of this, while in “Don Quixote and Sancho Panza” there is a spontaneity similar to that found in a child’s crayon drawing, the child who inhabits every sound utopia. In “Christ Carrying His Cross” tragedy, richness of representation and dynamism all resonate in complete unison along the uphill climb to Calvary; the same dynamism and efficacious plasticity is to be found in the Adam and Eve “cycle”, in his Saint Francis, whose gesture seems to embrace the whole Town together with whoever is viewing the work and also in the panel “The Saints of the Three Ceri”, who are united in a physical relationship with the Town in the same way as the crossbowmen, depicted  on another panel, in joyful, nay, triumphant attitude. A figure who has emerged from the popular and colourful world of the Tarot playing cards, the King of Cups, is depicted brandishing a sceptre, an allusion to the medieval symbolism so frequently encountered in our Town; other works take inspiration from the straightforward and genuine rural environment that was so akin to Ajò’s sensibility, “The Gleaner”, “Women Shucking Corn”, or the “Rustic Couple with a Child and some Animals”: the faces and gestures express a serene acceptance of a hard existence lived in symbiosis with the rhythms of Nature. Animals also acquire dignity in their own right as individual subjects in the works representing a turkey, some hens, a fish or a pig, each work different from the other, thus demonstrating the flair and the originality of the artist, but also linked by the shared leitmotiv of a discreet chromaticity, an almost naturalistic taste which, however, never lapses into the conventional. One perceives a secular but profound spirituality in the “Madonna and Child”, an Alma Mater or Nurturing Mother who is holding the Baby Jesus to her breast, but who is enfolded in his embrace, almost as in an oval, which is the symbol of fertility and creation. Similarly, a natural religiosity, a deep-rooted pietas, an almost atavistic faith emanates from the vase which, in an extraordinary complementation between the brilliance of the  white and the delicacy of the chromatic outlines, depicts a man and a woman holding hands around a tree trunk creating, through the subliminal circularity of its movement, a modern revisitation of the Tree of Life and all its prolific fruitfulness.