The GENERAL OF ENRICO BAJ

When a suit holds the world

Enrico Baj was a writer, sculptor, set designer and painter, but perhaps if he could choose a definition he would have preferred that of “free spirit”.

Enrico Baj was in contact with the major European players of the postwar avant-garde art, he was born in Milan in 1924 and having crossed the world war in his youth he had developed a deep antiwar sentiment against any kind of authoritarian system.
Of course this feeling was driving Enrico Baj when at the end of the fifties he began to create his “generals” and later on his “Military Saves” with polymateric collage that assembled trimmings, tassels and buttons and haberdashery, while creating cartoon characters (or puppets) in uniform.

These children faces and just mentioned in the features, with the chest covered with medals, they lost any symbol of strength and majesty to dress irony and paradox, two words dear to Baj, who liked to refer to the irreverence of the Dada movement and that has always opposed the art weapons and intelligence to those firearms.

There is a fabric so noble, rare and extraordinary to seem a fabric coming from a fairy tale. It is the Marine Byssus, obtained from thin filaments that comes out from a huge shell, the pinna nobilis. Also known as “gold of the sea”, thanks to its preciousness it was once used to wrap laces and accessories for popes or kings. Now that the shellfish from which this delicate thread of linen from where it comes from risks the be extinguished and the fishing is now forbidden, there is only one survived craft woman throughout Europe. Her name is Chiara Vigo, a unique weaver and almost a little ‘witch, who inherited the old grandmother’s frame, in addition to her ability and she has also found a way to gather the strands from the shell without removing it from the seabed and without damaging the shell. Sant’Antioco island in Sardinia, famous in the past also for its “masters of fine linen”, Chiara continues this fascinating tradition and full of secrets that she is ready to pass on to her daughter, as a mission, a kind of vocation to the magic of a fabric that instead of coming from the earth, it grows in the sea.