For connoisseurs of blue chickens

New Mexico is world-renowned for its ceramics, from ancestral lineages of Pueblo pottery-making to Mexican and Spanish colonial traditions. Because our local ceramic heritage is so rich, we have fewer opportunities to see great ceramic design from other parts of the world. “Italia: Postwar Ceramics” at The Sagrada by Clay + Coda, a vintage design gallery in Old Town, provides a compact but insightful overview of Italian ceramics made between 1955 and 1975. It’s a must-see for anyone with an interest in Italian design or mid-century modern design in general.

Some pieces in the show were designed by Aldo Londi, including several from the Rimini Blu collection he created for Tuscan manufacturer Bitossi, starting in 1955. Known for their distinctive turquoise-ultramarine glazes and imprinted textures, some of the most coveted Rimini Blu pieces are the folk art-inspired animal sculptures. Clay + Coda has one of Londi's blue chickens on offer for $350 — a fair price for an iconic design object. In addition to the ceramics, you can pick up a brief biography of the ceramicist written by his son, Luca Londi, which I read with great interest. He had a fascinating life.

In 1932, Aldo Londi was drafted into the Italian army and sent to Eritrea, which served as the launching ground for Benito Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia. Londi never held any strong political beliefs, it seems, apart from liking people from all cultures and not wanting to fight them. So, he was grateful that during all his years of military service, he never had to fire “a single round of ammunition.” Rather, he spent his war years sketching, painting and making ceramic art wherever he was stationed. When he was captured by the British and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in South Africa, he managed to befriend his jailers, who gave him access to clay, pigments, brushes and kilns. At one point, he built a six-meter-tall reinforced concrete sculpture in the middle of the camp. When he returned to Italy after the war, he was neither traumatized or demoralized, as many soldiers were, but simply revved up about the artistic ideas he’d been developing during his imprisonment.

Londi’s raw, modern forms took inspiration from African and Etruscan art, as well as cubism and art brut. But his classically-trained assistants didn’t always get it. As his son wrote, “There was no end to fights with the Raphaelesque artists, the ones who painted even the tiniest details with their fine-tipped paintbrushes.”

Clay + Coda pairs vintage Londi pieces with a selection of Venetian glassworks from the same postwar period, including a sensual clam shell paperweight by Murano maestro Archimede Seguso.

Also on display are recent Londi knock-offs from a big-box store that imitate his all-over textures. The pottery is proof of the enduring popularity of Londi’s designs but also their continued commercial debasement. Londi’s designs may have been mass-produced, too, but they were still made with care and pride, using hand-applied sgraffito techniques, whereas the rip-offs, pumped out of molds, are cheap, soulless replicas. When viewed alongside the originals, there’s simply no comparison.

Logan Royce Beitmen is an arts writer for the Albuquerque Journal. He covers visual art, music, fashion, theater and more. Reach him at lbeitmen@abqjournal.com or on Instagram at @loganroycebeitmen.