Exhibition: Sphere/Sfera

Exhibition in collaboration with the ceramist Agostino Branca

Location: Scuderie di Palazzo Gallone, Tricase (Lecce), Italy

Date: August 17-27, 2025

The exhibition will be followed by the publication of a book with texts by Agostino Branca, Manuela De Leonardis, Salvatore Matteo, Carlo Morciano, Ornella Ricchiuto, Vincenzo Ruberto.

The site-specific installation Sphere/Sfera by American artist Jack Sal, conceived specifically for the Scuderie di Palazzo Gallone in Tricase, is an expression of a profound dialogue with both the architectural and historical-artistic elements of the bell tower of the Convent of San Domenico, among the most significant examples of Salento Baroque, and with ceramic artist Agostino Branca of the historic Bottega Branca.

The work refers to the ancient glazed ceramic spheres screwed into the fresh plaster of the spire of the bell tower built around 1688, also mentioned in Salvatore Cassati's volume La chiesa di San Domenico in Tricase, published in 1977. Following a tradition dating back to the 11th century widespread in Italy especially in coastal cities, which saw the use of ceramic inserts of various colors and origins as decorative elements of church bell towers (initially these were salvaged furnishings), the spire of the bell tower of the Convent of San Domenico was also adorned with irregular ceramic spheres glazed in green, honey (light yellow) and brown colors visible even from a distance. The decorative function was combined with the symbolic one of recalling spirituality, to which the very shape of the sphere alludes, which like the circle leads back to the sky, the spiritual world and the cosmos in its completeness.

During the restoration, reconstruction and relocation of the 20 ceramic spheres, made by Tricase's historic Bottega Branca, traces of letters engraved on the surface emerged, including the word “tissi” whose etymology is unknown. It is precisely the element of writing that, along with numerology, represents a conceptual value for Jack Sal, who joins together these twenty ceramic spheres (each about 15 centimeters in diameter) creating with silk ribbon a visual script in which the Kabbalah's Tree of Life is freely interpreted.

Sphere/Sfera represents the connecting element with the memory of a past that belongs to the community, but also the friendship and collaboration between Jack Sal and Agostino Branca that dates back to the summer of 1989, when Jack Sal, who had already been frequenting Italy for a four years, between Rome, Todi, Milan, Padua and Venice, arrives in the Salento countryside, near Santa Maria di Leuca, as a guest in the farmhouse of the Milanese gallery owner Chicca Ghirindelli, owner of the Il Milione gallery. In Tricase he visited the workshop that Agostino Branca had opened a year earlier on Via Tempio. The sympathy between the two artists is immediate and mutual: with great generosity Branca makes available to Sal his knowledge in the field of traditional ceramics, his creativity, materials and equipment to produce new works.

The U.S. artist creates the "tile field," two series of square glazed majolica tiles in green and white and red and white on which he paints a repeated black mark, similar to the one that appears on the walls of the 17th-century Gandini Chapel which he frescoed in 1986, at the American Academy in Rome and later on the 15 steel panels of the 11 plus 4 permanent installation (1999) at the Albornoz Palace Hotel in Spoleto and on the series of white porcelain cups with the black brushstroke provided by Illy Caffè for the Art Collection series, which were never put into production but entered the collection of Claudia Stern, Germany's first female sommelier, in Cologne, Germany.

Thirty years later, the partnership between Jack Sal and Agostino Branca is renewed with the production of the book Half Empty/Half Full. Food Culture Ritual (2019), the realization of the work Half Empty/Half Full (2023) as part of the project La Parsimonia dell'Acqua curated by Cintya Concari and Roberto Marcatti, and the project Sphere/Sfera (2025).