The work of
Resta Studios is exhibited in New York, Rome, Chicago, Auckland, San Francisco,
Seattle, the Crystal Palace, The Pereslav Museum, and Museo del Castello
and other woldwide venues. The studio creates a sanctuary of landscape,
rock, wood, water, color and light, well-known for commissions of monumental
sculptures, large-scale ceramics, fountains, pools, paintings and living
landscapes.
Piero Resta,
its founder, left the security of air force academy in Italy only months
before graduating as an officer to pursue his lifelong passion to be an
artist. For years he weathered tinned sardines, cold nights
and friends’ couches, pursuing the serpentine path to his current creative
tour-de-force. While some people feel the vigor of their days behind
them, Piero blazes ahead into ever-more dynamic, far-reaching forms of
expression, humbling vibrant upcoming artists who seek to usurp all but
masters. I am reminded of Irving Stone’s Michelangelo, as he
portrayed him in The Agony and the Ecstasy, as I watch Piero work.
His very movements are blinding, in their total commitment to art.
Piero Resta
enjoyed significant recognition as a fashion photographer in New York,
where he went on to create films, festivals and extravagant proceedings,
including parades and miraculous feasts. He has hobnobbed with
giants before they were such, working painstakingly on his paintings of
mythic women in dreamlike surroundings. As he began to enter the
public eye, he left to travel the middle, and far east, hungry for more
divergent forms of luminosity, texture, and color then the US had to offer.
There, he learned the subtleties of fresco, the construction of grand ceramic
fountains, the art of carving marble, wood, and entirely different forms
of stone. When he finally returned to his wife, in the house
by a jungle steam, he settled back to fix what he’s leaned, planting rare
gourmet herbs, and mastering clay and glazes, as sought to recreate his
life… To live completely in art.
Resta’s person
is motivated by an ability to express his search for individual freedom
through an energetic, creation of incredibly-varied forms of art.
Commissioned for a set of ceramic dishes to present to the Dali Lama, Piero
and his wife collaborate on a dazzling service of turquoise and gold, then
present his holiness the culinary equivalent the dishes’ art, arriving
to cook a famous feast. I once asked Piero how he maintained his
incredible vitality for all the many passions in life. At the time,
he was madly chiseling a ten foot high, thousand-year-old redwood log with
an antique Scandinavian mallet which belong to the great grandfather of
a close friend, after staying up all night, drinking, eating, and dancing.
"I only do
things I love." He replied, pointedly.
Piero’s personal
sanctuary, located along the obscure, but well-traveled dirt highway to
Hana, slices back time to old Hawaii. He is visited by world-renown
figures in their fields, who drop by unexpectedly at all hours of the day
or night. There is never a shortage of hospitality at his magic villa,
which at any moment can spontaneously erupt into Balinese dancing, flamenco
guitar, or spirited poetry. He is known throughout the islands for
his creative parties, charisma, and general lust for life. There
are countless people who recognize his genius for the art of living, a
compliment he realized long ago, in the slightest act. His vision
is immense in scope; he is an expansive, resonating instrument the utterly-profound
gravitates to. He is intense, and simultaneously charming.
As cosmologist, healer, and humble visionary, he will amaze and nourish
you with his unquenchable thirst for the surrealistic marvelous.
Few people I’ve ever met in the tens of thousands, have succeeded in enjoying
their entire lives as elegantly as they spread subtle color on fine canvas,
put a final mark on a marble statue, or prepare the culinary masterpiece
you might soon enjoy by candlelight, with fine wine, and scintillating
company
under moonlit
stars.
