Carapelli For Art 2018, the first edition of the visual arts award, celebrating the 125 years of Carapelli Firenze, invited to re-read its brand values in a contemporary key: craftsmanship, tradition and quality. At the end of a selection from over 550 works proposed from more than 20 countries around the world, the jury established the winning works in the "Open" and "Academy" categories.
The theme of the first edition: Maestry, Tradition and Quality.
A modern and contemporary reinterpretation of the values of a historic Italian brand. The meeting and the conjugation between tradition and innovation.
CATEGORY OPEN
Winner
David Casini
The jury decided to reward David Casini's work for his consistency in combining tradition and innovation, thanks to a personal idea of sculpture, experimented and consolidated by the artist over the years, by assembling delicate elements taken from reality, transformed and inserted in a new vision poised between past, present and future.
In Pratomagno , 2018, the craftsmanship of sculptural making is summarized, which intervenes to shape and decorate the olive wood, and the technological innovation represented by the crystal of an iPad, where the Tuscan forest is reflected. These are two different aesthetics in terms of origin and temporality but intertwined in a structure created by the artist who unites and consecrates them, with references to ancient relics or museum display cases, caskets of millenary stories.

Special Mentions
Aischa Gianna Muller
A special mention to the poetry with which Aischa Gianna Muller transforms the Italian agricultural landscape and her ability to cite the historical experience of the Land Art. The artist offers a vision that tends to go beyond the boundary line, which goes beyond the horizon, emphasizing the conflict between the action of man and the natural and inexorable passing of time.

Marcello Spada
Per un’oliva pallida io posso realmente delirare, 2018 by Marcello Spada stands out for its original and ironic character: the artist recalls the Carapelli Award "Gastronomo d'Oro", awarded in 1967 to Ugo Tognazzi and cites the actor a verse from the book L'abbuffone, a satirical paraphrase of a poem by Salvatore Quasimodo. Tognazzi, excellence in the entertainment world, an expert in the Italian culinary tradition and supporter of a vital and goliardic relationship between man and food, is celebrated in this work which, re-enacting one of the most traditional monumental forms, echoes the food and wine culture of Italy, anchored to its roots and, at the same time, projected towards international success.

CATEGORY ACADEMY
1º Place
Alessandro Bozzoli
The jury, appreciating the mental and visual elaboration that underlies it, assigns the first prize to the work Divina Colorum by Alessandro Bozzoli (Academy of Fine Arts of Brera). The artist making a translation of passages from the impressive Dante's poem with the exclusive use of a chromatic grammar, establishes unexpected connections between the metric of fourteenth-century poetry and the pixels of digital technology. By entering research that experiments with new versions of language through visual forms, the work stands out for its ability to include differentiated expressive areas and registers, for the qualities of synthesis and representation of the already given.

2º Place
Cecilia Mentasti
The second prize goes to the work Ovunque ma non qui by Cecilia Mentasti (Academy of Fine Arts of Brera). The jury appreciated the updated use of an ancient technique such as encaustic (painting made with colored wax). Exercise motivated by the need to rethink painting in relation to contemporary modes of representation through images.

3º Place
Davide D'Amelio
Third prize in the opera De Pisis # 01 by Davide D’Amelio. The painting in question, apparently inspired by the "realism" of the photographic medium, develops a critical discourse both on the hierarchies that through the vision regulate the relationships between individuals and on the specific of the same pictorial doing.

Carapelli For Art's Jury 2018:
Federica Boràgina, Giulia Brivio, Matteo Innocenti, Gabriele Tosi