 Carla Schucani, a native figure from Perugia, pastry cook and sophisticated gourmet, is a true artist who has been quietly painting and creating works of art all her life. She is a cuisine artist, able to create delicious recipes, cleverly combining special and unusual ingredients. She is a master with chocolate and sugar in her most famous Sandri pastry shop, right in the centre of the historical part of Perugia, where she has been creating her now famous “shop windows” with real sculptures made of sugar that depict topical city events like exhibitions, celebrations, feasts and all sorts of events, so much so that for years now she is said to offer the city her "sweet news”. Schucani's artistic skills came to light back in 1943 when, at the age of eleven, she began to paint her first works, inspired by the beauty of the Alps. She was born in Perugia of a Swiss father and indeed spent much of her childhood and adolescence in Switzerland, between Sent and Chur, which is where her family chose to seek refuge during the war. Here, in the Grisons, she began to paint in the style of the expressionists, the fauves in some cases. Her early works are more naive but then, with thicker, bolder strokes of the spatula, she moved on to extremely expressive and personal works that depict natural landscapes, like her beautiful interpretations of Lake Trasimeno and of the architecture of Perugia and other cities that she visited on her numerous travels through Italy and abroad.
Then, she turned to sculpture, but here she remained more faithful to the visual element and even revisited more traditional pictures and sculptures. She made sketches for important sculptures on glass for the Fucina degli Angeli di Egidio Costantini, in Venice. She has also designed jewellery and decorated ceramics.
Her early exhibitions were brilliant. The authoritative critics, Enrico Crispolti and Valerio Mariani, wrote about her and personal shows dedicated to her were organized in Rome and Perugia. The market expressed interest, but the young painter refused to sell her works and decided, at that time, to paint only for herself. After that, few are the exhibitions in which she takes part. In 1984, Massimo Duranti convinced her to hold a large personal show in Perugia, while recently, in September 2007, back in Switzerland, in fact in Chur the capital of the Canton of the Grisons, the city where she studied, her former school friend Guido Jörg, following the wishes of the entire city population, organized a major retrospective exhibition, which was curated by Massimo Duranti and Guido Jörg himself.
And now, the City of Perugia is announcing a major anthological show dedicated to her at the Rocca Paolina, Sala Cannoniera, with her paintings, sugar sculptures, glass, jewellery and ceramics. There will also be a significant catalogue published by EFFE, Fabrizio Fabbri Editore.
(18-03-2008 11:18)
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