Jean Blanchaert
Lucio Bubacco
Jean Blanchaert was born in Milan in 1954, and is an art critic, curator and artist. For more than thirty-five years he ran Galleria Blanchaert in Milan, spotlighting twentieth-century glass and contemporary glassworks. The gallery, which his mother Silvia opened in 1957, embraced Murano’s masterpieces right from the outset, even though at the time they were somewhat overlooked. He curated two major exhibitions for the FAI (Fondo Ambiente Italiano - the Italian Heritage Fund) dedicated to contemporary glass, and was also the curator of the exhibition entitled Vitrea. Vetro italiano contemporaneo d’autore (Vitreous. Italian auteur contemporary glass), presented by Triennale Milano and Fondazione Cologni dei Mestieri d’Arte in April 2021. In 2017, against the backdrop of the first edition of the Venice Glass Week festival, Jean Blanchaert and Noah Khoshbin together curated the Robert Wilson in Glass exhibition organised by Fondazione Berengo. At the two editions of Homo Faber in Venice, he worked alongside Stefano Boeri to curate the Best of Europe (2018) and Next of Europe (2022) exhibitions dedicated to Europe’s finest craftsmanship.
Lucio Bubacco was born into the art and craft of his father in Murano in 1957, and started lampworking glass at a very tender age. For three years, he worked tirelessly at a major glassworks on Murano, crafting thousands of tiny sculptures that had to be seamlessly executed in a specific way. Having perfected his skill, at the age of seventeen he decided to open his own business. He learned the refined techniques of anatomical design from painter Alessandro Rossi, allowing him to design his own works; the end result take us back to Renaissance Venice. A solitary genius of lampworking, his work sees a prolific creativity that takes a variety of forms, with an exceptional fantastical vein and powerful literary references. The world he draws on for inspiration is a pagan, pre-monotheist, pre-Jewish, pre-Christian, pre-Islamic world: it is the universe of the Egyptian, Greek, Hellenistic and Roman cultures, not forgetting the erotic, humorous incursions into Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron and the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. But there is also the Catholic sphere of Dante Alighieri, and the Venetian tradition of the Commedia dell’Arte.
