From a very young age, while still a student, Luciano Vistosi breathed in the scent of glass in the family furnace and learnt all its secrets, driven by a curiosity and inventiveness that would bear fruit when, in 1952, on the death of his father, he founded Vetreria Vistosi with his brother and uncle.
With foresight, he foresaw the future success of object-design and, by creating it himself and involving such prestigious names as Magistretti, Sottsass, Zanuso, Aulenti, and many others, he inaugurated a happy season of production that successfully projected Venetian glass onto a stage that was no longer and not only tourist-oriented, but rather a fortunate symbiosis of modern refinement and creativity. The inventive freshness that can be found in the lamps, cups and generally in the objects of use successfully created by Luciano Vistosi until the 1970s, subtends what is the true outcome of his talent. Sculpture.
A shy and reserved man, Luciano Vistosi infuses his art with a vital energy that perhaps amazes himself. His ability to capture light has more pictorial than sculptural comparisons.
The material is molded in his hands with a lightness that takes us back to the purest lines of artists of the past who made formal elegance a banner; and at the same time, his ability to capture light makes him very modern and up-to-date and clothes his works – be they ‘ensembles’, angels of subtle transparency, or ‘glass caves’, ancestral boulders skillfully twisted by his hands, or ‘light constructions’ with a skillfully evocative refraction. Despite being struck down by a serious illness at the end of the 1990s, Luciano Vistosi never interrupted his artistic activity, continuing to realize his sublime and delicate flashes of light in his studio-atelier in Murano, with strength and generous character, until the last days of his life.
