An Interview With the Artist
by Sandy Borcom
 
 

His presence if evident everywhere and in many forms: ceramic fountains, paintings, mosaic works, sculptures.  Both in Maui and elsewhere, Piero Resta’s extensive and impressive repertoire of art thrives in public places and private collections.  One of his most powerful of all works, and truly the most involved, is "Villa Tamarinda", his home in Kaupo, Maui.  Here in this extraordinary Sanctuary, life is fully integrated into art.  The garden and the canvas, the free-sanding arches and the ceramic vessels, the granite and the cardinal, all coalesce in the mouth of the sun.
 

MV:  Tell us about your cover painting, "The Rapture of Europa."
 

Resta: Europe in Greek mythology was a beautiful expression of the Goddess but ultimately a mere mortal.  It is a story of divine love.  Zeus seducing Europa.  Zeus observed Europa bathing with maidens at the river.  But being a God who cannot mate with a human he transforms himself  into a white bull.  She goes and caresses the bull’s horns and lays a garland or ley of flowers on him.  Suddenly she finds herself riding the bull on the ocean waves caught in the passion and rapture of the moment.  The brilliance is the divinity of female and the compassion of love alongside the rapture of seduction.   The central figure represents that which is stable and elemental which is the basis of all things..   For the Greeks, compassion and love always leads to tragedy.  Beauty however, always survives above tragedy.  It is the most constant thing, the best of human consciousness.  This I my newest piece, although I started it in Ha’iku in 1982.
 

MV: What drew you to finish this piece?
 

Resta: It has always been a very private painting.  I only imprinted a new reality using that history (the original painting). To build yup to the present moment… Breaking away from time and space by combining old and new…it would be considered almost sacrilegious to the masters…even my family and collectors were against it.  But I am not negating history…I an only imprinting… "now" upon it, which in fact is what we do every moment.